SanDisk Sansa e130: The Micro Version of the iPod Mini

This week’s contest post is here! Leave a comment at the end of this post for a chance to win one of the new Slappa Shockshell iPod Mini cases! Tell us what you think of the review or how you’d use the SanDisk Sansa MP3 player.

IntroductionToday, we’ll be looking at the latest entry from SanDisk, a leading memory card manufacturer. SanDisk’s last MP3 player was at one point the #1 selling non-Apple player, yet had only a single digit percentage of the market share. The new Sansa is currently available in both a 512 MB version as the e130, and a 1 GB version, sold as the e140. SanDisk’s Sansa is a far better than Apple’s iPod Shuffle, as a flash mp3 player. We’ll discover what distinguishes this player from its competitors, and why it should be on your shopping list. This is not the first player we’re reviewing here at Live Digitally. You can read here about our standard methods of testing used for music players. Sandisk’s player was tested with firmware 1.0.000 as it was recently introduced only last month. Testing was undertaken with both Duracell disposable alkaline batteries and Energizer NIMH rechargeable cells.

What’s In The Box

SanDisk Sansa unit, 512 MB

ear bud headphones with small, medium, and large earbuds

clear plastic carrying case

arm band

USB adapter

software on mini CD

quick start guide

AAA battery, alkaline

Features & PerformanceThe SanDisk Sansa player is a vertical format player, like the iPod, and unlike the more common horizontal format that most others utilize (including SanDisk’s previous player). The dimensions are 55mm x 74mm x 14mm, and the device weighs 1.4 oz without battery, and 1.8 oz with the battery installed. While a little larger than some other players out there, it is still plenty small. The device derives its power from a standard AAA battery, and claims a 17 hour maximum battery life without other features enabled. This is a reasonable claim, with features enabled, I reached 13.5 hours from a new alkaline cell. The Sansa performed just as well with the NIMH cell, thus battery life was comparable. I’m especially partial to electronics that use a standard battery, it’s cost efficient to use your own rechargeable batteries so you always have a fresh one available. Also, when on the road, a disposeable batter can be found just about everywhere, eliminating the worry about running out of power.

The player is controlled by a four way touchpad on the face of the device, with a center button. There is a hold button on the left side to lock the controls; this is useful for vigorous activity (bungee cord jumping or Nascar driving come to mind, even without using “hold,” no buttons were pressed by accident). On the right side is a “Menu” button, and in the upper right hand corner is a volume wheel. Three annoyances should be noted. First, you must hold down the menu button for a full five seconds to power down the device. Second, the volume wheel has deep indents making it difficult to spin up or down quickly. Third, with the volume to max, when I turned off the player, then restarted it, the volume was set down to about 75%. This feature is annoying. Using the Sansa in the car, via tape adapter, requires volume to be fully cranked up for a quality sound (this is most likely a safety feature approved by some “Audiology Society,” but annoying nonetheless). With that said, the rest of the navigation is smooth, and rather intuitive. I had little trouble getting around and adjusting all settings before reading the manual (this is highly unusual)!

The included miniCD is hardly essential for operation of the player. It includes the manual in PDF format. Additional offers from Rhapsody (10 free downloads, 1 month subscription), Audible (3 free downloads), and AudioFeast (60 day free trial) fill up the remainder of the disc. In my opinion, one of the great features of the player is the fact that there is no needed software. I already have more than enough software on my computer (and with the amount of testing lately it’s reaching epidemic proportions), and I chose to leave this “stuff” uninstalled (although I will readily admit I was tempted by Rhapsody’s 10 free downloads). I tested the e130 model; it has 512 MB of flash memory internally. Formatted, the capacity shows up as a whopping 492 MB of storage. The player’s memory can be expanded with use of removable flash memory cards. A Secure Digital card slot along the side of the unit accepts up to a 2 GB card (larger than some other players). A MultiMedia Card worked as well during testing with no issues. The Sansa also functions as an SD card reader/writer when connected to a computer via its USB 2.0 connection. This is very useful if you have more than one SD card device. When on the road, and looking to read SD cards from a digital camera (or other device) you need not a separate dedicated reader or USB cable. The stand out feature here however, is that songs on the buit in memory and removable flash card are combined into one large database. This was a big weakness of the last player I tested with a similar setup. This makes the memory of the SanDisk Sansa not only easily expandable, but also seamlessly usable.

Speaking of databases, another great feature of this player is how easily it organizes the music tracks. My MP3’s were all easily loaded onto the player across the USB 2.0 connection with a “copy ‘n’ paste” technique. The Sansa, upon powering up, sorted the tracks and had them completely organized in seconds. The music could then be played by artist, album, genre, or even by year! This is the first flash player I’ve seen that has been able to take advantage of the ID3 music tags which are encoded into the music tracks, and this is a great feature. Of course, the songs can also be played in a random fashion. Folks with larger collections will especially appreciate these options. The Sansa’s display is very usable. While it is only one color, blue, the text is very readable, even through the clear case. Viewable information while playing music files: song title, artist, track number, album name, length of the track, a progress bar, and battery life. This is more than enough information, and is presented in a readable format. The text size is a little small relative to the size of the display, but the benefit is seen with longer track names which don’t require constant scrolling. Depressing the center button changes the album name and artist to display the type of file, and the encoding information.

Other features include a built in FM radio, incremented in the non-US 0.1 frequency shifts. The radio was clear, and presets were available. There is no recording feature for microphone, line in, or radio recording. I was not particularly bothered by this omission as only a minority of users avail themselves to this feature in other players. A unique “extra” feature is a stopwatch, which may be useful on the exercise circuit.

The SanDisk player can handle MP3 files, WMA files, as well as Audio Books. It played all the MP3 and WMA files in my test suite, which includes both constant and variable bit rate tracks. It will not play WAV, AAC (Apple), OGG or other file formats. As the Sansa is at home with the two most common music formats outside of Apple’s AAC (which only the iPod line plays), this is more than adequate for the vast majority of users out there. The Sansa carries Microsoft’s “Plays For Sure” logo. This is a Microsoft led initiative to let users know that the players that carry this logo are designed to play the files from partner music download sites such as Wal-Mart and Real’s Rhapsody, which also display this logo. While mainly an anti-iPod designed campaign (who can blame them), it does carry a guarantee of compatibility (and less hassle) of playing the protected WMA files from these music download stores on your approved player.

The included headphones, as is usually the case with MP3 players, were less than perfect. The carry the SanDisk logo and are white. They feature an earbud design, with a range of three included sizes to achieve a tight fit. When they say “in the ear,” they mean it. While this may remind you of your childhood pediatrician looking into your ear for an infection, it is designed to seal out ambient noises which it did, to a certain extent. This would be useful on a long airplane ride, for example. I personally find this design a little less comfortable than some other solutions, but this is purely my opinion. The earbuds reproduced the entire frequency of sound, but as is always the case with micro sized speakers, the bass was anemic (even max boosted). The high end also sounded a little thin. The high and low ends sounded much fuller through the other tested solutions (headphones, car stereo, and computer speakers). Overall, I would characterize the included earbuds as average; however, audiophiles should definitely plan on upgrading these. The volume itself through the earbuds was loud, but hardly “ear splitting;” “Spinal Tap” devotees will be disappointed.

The included carrying case is a clear plastic design, which snaps in three places closed. It is ideal for keeping the player dry in anything but a downpour. The downside is that you must take the player out to access the USB connector as it is covered by the cap (which it always should be to keep out dust and dirt) or to change the battery or memory card. These are minor shortcomings in the end. Included also is an elastic arm band to keep the player nearby on those exercise runs. While useful for the Ironman crowd, and old fashioned belt clip would be incredibly useful, but is lacking (as well as many other players). Also, there is no hole for a neck lanyard. For the non-Ironman, the player thankfully does easily stow in either a shirt or pants pocket whether in the case or out.

The SanDisk Sansa features a number of useful tweaks to improve the sound of the music from the player. They are described as follows:

Equalizer: Presets for rock, jazz, classical, and pop, as well as a custom 5 band user adjustable setting work to keep whatever you’re listening to sounding great.

WOW: This serves to strengthen the top and bottom of the music to give it more punch, works best with rock. It is designed to overcome the limitations of smaller speakers, and to create an accurate, lifelike, full and rich sound.

Focus: This adds strength in your choice of the low, mid, or high sections of the audio; I found high sounded the best.

TruBass: Unlike many competitor “take it or leave it” offerings, this one is adjustable in 9 increments; I liked the full nine best for rock tracks.

SRS 3D: This is a spatialization feature to enhance the stereo separation between the left and right speakers. It can be boosted incrementally with 9 settings, I liked 7 the best. Similar offerings sometimes sound rather artificial but this one sounded great, even in a 180 watt, 6 speaker car audio system.

Many of the effects can be adjusted with the music playing so you can hear what effect it is having. This makes it much easier to adjust to your desired level. With the adjustments outlined above, I found the music to have a full and rich sound across a wide variety of songs except when playing through the included earbuds. In the car, through the cassette adaptor, I found the audio very rich, with tons of bass, but not overwhelming the middle and high tones. Only real “golden ears” would be able to tell that the music was not playing right off the CD. However, if you take the above enhancements off, it would be pretty easy to tell this was compressed music, and directly from the CD. Simple proof that all these enhancements are working towards a full and rich sound, and not just distorting the original.

Strengths

powered by standard AAA battery

supports Microsoft’s “Plays For Sure” music initiative

readable screen

long battery life

supports up to 2 GB Secure Digital card for expansion

songs on card and internal memory are combined seamlessly

no software required on computer for use

included carrying case

songs can be played by artist, album, or year based just on ID3 tags

no driver required

Audio Book compatible

Weaknesses

port covers not tethered

no recording feature from open air or radio

only supports MP3 and WMA files

takes 5 seconds to turn off

volume control doesn’t spin

when playing album, tracks not in original order

Who Should Buy This?

The Roadmaster: I found that this player fit very well in my car cupholder. The vertical format made it easy to adjust without having to constantly rotate it. The screen was easily readable during day, or night. With additional SD cards, and standard batteries, I can take it on a roadtrip and never run out of songs or power. Sure, there are hard drive players that can get the job done, but not at this bargain basement price. After a minute of adjusting the sound settings, the audio was accurately rich and full, with appropriate separation. I’m sure I could “fool” the majority of folks into thinking the music was playing directly from a CD, and not compressed. With such a great sound, I can stop focusing on the player, and enjoy the music.

Conclusion

SanDisk’s Sansa e130 is a strong entry in this ultra crowded market segment. With very adjustable music settings, organization by artist and genre, and an integrated SD slot, folks will be well served by this music player. Add in a very readable screen, and an intuitive interface, and SanDisk has a real winner on their hands. This is the first MP3 player to be “LD Approved,” and it is awarded without reservation to this noteworthy device. When compared to an iPod Mini with no screen, minimal adjustments, and a nonreplaceable battery, the Sansa stands out even more.

While you did mention that it comes with a trial subscription to Audible, you didn’t mention how well it plays Audible audiobooks. It is the only flash drive that supports the highest quality Audible format.

Great review…one thing i would like to address is the ability of the player to play custom playlist/folders. I hope a firmware upgrade will take care of this, otherwise an excellent product for the price

I’ve been trying to decide which Solid State Mp3 player to buy and I think you have sold the Sansa Sandisk player to me. The display looks a lot better than the Creative and the ability to add extra memory is great.

to #13,yes for audible book format, no for music.
This Sansa is great, just tag your titles for albums to play in order, and use the right size supplied earpieces for the earphones. Sounz excellent!Transcoded to 64kbs wma & got about 14.5 hours on it..Try it, You’ll like it!

i bought this mp3 player and i thought it was great. It has great sound quality and the original earphones have the best quality. If this had playlists it would need some crappy syncing software which find every single music file on your computer -m:trip- .

Anybody had trouble with “glitches” during play? A pop or click occurring irregularly but at the average of two to five minutes. Trouble not with 128/160 mp3’s as replay does not glitch in the same place. Otherwise, a great device. Love to run it off (cheap and reusable) NiMH AAA’s.

Great value player. I can recommend this one to everybody! Don’t forget to update firmware, it will fix some of the playlists bugs, and in my case the player also stopped with the small interruptions during playback!

anyone have problems with SD card power consumption? I downloaded the bios upgrade, but I can only seem to get about four hours out of a brand new battery using my 2 gig SD card, as soon as you unplug the card, it trucks on and on for hours and hours, but it defeats the purpose if I only have limited usability of the expanded memory. All songs are ripped at 320kbs so that only equates to around 7 cds with the onboard 1 gig storage

hey all, i had being looking for mp3 since a mounth, i sended email, and this is the best one, buying one tomorow. ps: ( you can buy this mp3 player at COSTCO for 89.99$ canadian )www.costco.com
thats where i found the best deal

Latest Firmware (1.0.010a) fixes the “album playback” problem. Now, if each file is has the proper Track Number id3 tag, it can play albums in album order. It also adds a “favorites” list – like a playlist, however it is hard to use and not editable. You can’t re-arrange files, you can only delete and add songs. It plays the “favorites” playlist in the order you added them. There is only the one list, and you can’t make changes to it on the computer so the favorites playlist is practically useless to me.

Only way to manipulate playback order on this thing is to change id3 tags. I read somewhere that someone made a playlist by giving all the songs for that list the same album name, and ordering them by putting in track numbers. I guess that would work, but I have a problem with having to make changes to the song files themselves to accomplish this.

Bottom line, this seems to be a GREAT player, as long as you don’t need playlist support. Playing by Album, or Artist, or Alphabetically, or Shuffe – it is great.

Just ordered one from newegg.com for just under $68 SHIPPED. Supposed to come in Wednesday. Also ordered a Kingston 512MB SD card for $29 w/ a $6 rebate, SHIPPED. If you want the songs in order, organize by artist/album ripped by iTunes.

I have not been able to get netlibrary books (WMA format) to start play back where I left off. It plays the audio book great but the entire 15+ hour book is one WMA file and it restarts at the begining each time that the player is turned off and since the WMA file is so long the display only shows 00:00 for time. I have updated the firmware to 1.0.010a. Any help would be great!

It looks like this thing can also be powered via the usb port. I talked to Sandisk tech support and the verified that when in the Sandisk FM transmitter or plugged in for syncing, the player is on usb power. This could be a sweet setup to get one of those car lighter to usb converters and not worry about batteries on your road trip. The Sandisk FM transmitter is a little expensive, and I don’t think I’d want to mount that thing in my car anyway, but it’s something one could piece together I think. Anyone have success with this.

To #43, I have read that in order to have the player start in the file where you left off, you have to power down while the audio book is playing. Then, after restarting, just hit play and it will start where you left off. I haven’t verified this, but it’s worth a try.
-Gorp

I can’t wait until the problem with playing the files in original, album order (i.e., simply by filename) has been fixed. It’s so much annoying. Especially when you want to listen to a concert with the artist speaking between the songs.
(I’m really wondering and pondering: why, providing the sophisticated file order system based on ID3 tags, the producer did not take care of giving the most useful feature – sorting the files by names…)
Besides, the FM-recording option would be useful. Of course, I’ve already lost the USB cover (has anyone got any idea how I can protect the slot?). And I sometimes get furious not being able to get the player out of the case, as it often seems to be stuck.

If anybody should have news about improvements and upgrades in file sorting system, PLEASE LET US KNOW!

The problem w/playing files in album order has been fixed since Sept/Oct. Go to Sandisk website, and download firmware:http://www.sandisk.com/Retail/Default.aspx?CatID=1295
For your case, just remove the player, and dust a tiny bit of talc/baby powder on your finger, and rub it on inner case…No more stickies!
#51. What make of SD card is it? Should be no ads. Format it, to clean it up (make sure it’s FAT32).
#52 Can’t use USB power directly. I think Sandisk has an adaptor for car, but it is $$$.

I’ve had this little baby for 2 weeks now and I’m enjoying the hell out of it. Seems that when I have the SRS WOW engaged, the instruments truly crank out BUT the vocals decrease significantly. I’ve tried to tweak the custom equalizer (IMHO, the best setting) to remedy the loss of vocals but to no avail. If anybody figures the best setting/tweaking for SRS WOW w/o loss of vocals, let me know.

I keep changing the settings trying to find a good combination, but lately I’ve had good success with the following settings. On the custom equalizer set the first bar all the way up, the second about a third up, the third bar about half the way up and the last two bars about a third up. You can bring the vocals out a little more by increasing the middle bar. For the SRS WOW settings I have the Focus on mid, the TrueBass on 5 and the SRS 3D on 6. The best thing I did to enhance the sound was to replace the headphones. I spent $15 on some Sony MDR-E829V earbuds and the sound difference is incredible. If you are still using the earbuds that came with the mp3 player you are missing out. With the new earbuds, the sound quality of the Sansa is now close to my daughter’s more expensive iRiver T10 mp3 player. Overall, I’m very pleased with the Sansa!

In case anyone is wondering how to add or delete from the favorites list you hold down the middle button while the song is playing. The player will then ask if you want to add or delete a song from the favorites list. I had trouble finding this out after I did the firmware update.

To #46: I tried that (with an mp3 file), it doesn’t work. It just restarts from the beginning of the file you were listening to on shutdown. To #37: I have the latest firmware (1.0.010a), and that doesn’t work either. On start-up, the player is on pause; pressing the middle button just changes the information displayed about the song. It doesn’t play it. Anyone else got an idea? 🙂

To #46: I tried that (with an mp3 file), it doesn’t work. It just restarts from the beginning of the file you were listening to on shutdown. To #37: I have the latest firmware (1.0.010a), and that doesn’t work either. On start-up, the player is on pause; pressing the middle button just changes the information displayed about the song. It doesn’t play it. Anyone else got an idea? 🙂

re #63: I called Sandisk, and the lady said that they were working on a firmware update to get the bookmark/resume feature to work. She couldn’t give me any timeline as to when this update would come. I’m not sure I trust what she said 100%, so I also sent an email inquiry to Sandisk’s customer suppport. I’ll let you know when I get an answer.

My Sandisk e130 just stopped working. I got the thing for Christmas and it worked great for a few days and then just quit. Won’t turn on at all. Tried changing the battery, but that didn’t help either. Anyone had similar problem?

re# 64, to create a favorites list you must first update the firmware to version (1.0.010a). You can do this by going to Sandisk’s website. After that, the favorites list must be created from within the player. After you begin playing the song you want to add, press and hold the middle round button. The player will ask “Add to Favorites List?” To accept, make sure the check block is shaded then press the middle button again. The songs in the list are played in the order than you add them. You use the same procedure to delete songs from the list. The player will ask if you want to delete a song from the list. If you want to clear the entire favorites list, go to menu, settings, playback then clear favorites. To play your favoorites, go to menu, play music then favorites.

Ok i got the sandisk e130 and i am very happy with it and i have also gotten a leather case for it and a 1gb sd card. and it is just about complete or so i thought. i looked online for accesries and i found the speaker dock for it awesome. it aplifys the sound to a very high level without even the littlest bit of distortion. it has the mp3 player on ac power from the wall or by 4 AA batteries so that you batteries on your mp3 player are not wasted it also has an extra usb port as well as an audio jack that can be used to plug in any device with a headphone jack. the pacage comes with the dock, the ac cable, a longer usb cable, an audio cable and clamps to hang it ( or you can just set it on a table lol) its a great accesory and i would recomned it greatly

Got one today and have to say that I am frustrated as can be. I have an SD memory card from my previous MP3 player and Windows XP doesn’t recognize it when it is in the e130. It worked just fine in the Rio Forge I had previously but not this player. With no ability to delete files from the SD card, I don’t know if the problem is that the SD card is full or that it just isn’t being seen by Win/XP. I can listen to the contents of the SD card with the e130, so it isn’t a formattting or incompatibility problem.
I hope I can clear it up because the e130 is a much nicer and well put together device than any of the Rio machines I have owned.

My Sandisk e130 just stopped working. I got the thing for Christmas and it worked great for a few days and then just quit. Won’t turn on at all. Tried changing the battery, but that didn’t help either. Anyone had similar problem?

Comment by ray — 1/2/2006 @ 6:07 am —-Today the same happened to me. I can’t believe it. I just got it for x-mas also.Junior

Dale,
Your Rio Forge may not have used the same file system as the Sansa. The E130 uses FAT, or FAT32.
You’ll need to get a USB card reader, and connect to your XP machine thru the reader. You should be able to see the card. If not, you’ll need to use the RIO software to reformat it.
If the E130 can play the music, it is not the 130 at fault.

RE: #60…Your settings are almost EXACTLY like mine except the SRS 3D on mine is set to ‘1’. I’ve noticed higer settings on ‘3D’ makes higher pitched instruments (i.e. Cymbals) have an overly annoying tinny wavelike sound with to it. Cut the SRS 3D to 1 or 0 and it should eliminate the tinny ‘highs’.

somebody tell me wtf is goin on, got my sandisk for christmas its now jan 18th and i was using it ealier, about 3 minutes later i tried to turn it on and it will not turn on! someone tell me whats wrong and what i can do to fix it

About Bookmark/Resume: (to #73 etc). I connected SanDisk and got the following response: You are correct that the Audible format is ‘.aa’ . The Sansa e100 series does not support a bookmarking or resume function for MP3 files, only for Audible files. Our newer Sansa m200 series MP3 player supports resuming in all file formats, including MP3. As of this time there are no plans for a further firmware update to the e100 series that would attempt to make resuming MP3 files possible on that MP3 player.

Mine died on me as well (e140). It happened right after I used the car kit cassette adaptor (not sure if that had anything to do with it). It wouldn’t power on. I was able to exchange it and get a new one, as we only had it for 9 days. I’m paranoid that this is going to happen to my new one now. 🙁

I also had mine die on me, after owning it for only 9 days. It wouldn’t power on after having it adapted to the car kit. (Not sure if that had anything to do with it.) I was able to exchange it because I’d owned it for such a short time, but I’m really paranoid about my new one. After seeing here that others have had theirs die on them as well, I’m even more worried.

My sansa had a near death experience. The battery was low when I powered it down. The next day it wouldn’t come up – changed the battery to a fresh one – no luck reviving it. Tried a couple of new batteries – no luck. Then went back to the original battery – no luck ; decided to try again after putting the cover back on – it magically came on up. (I recall having tried the fresh batteries with AND without the cover on) What exactly revived it is an unknown at this point – but am hoping that this could help someone else……

I just got the sansa car transmitter and it works pretty well. The nice thing is that the player is powered by usb when it’s plugged in so I’m not using hte batteries. I’d like to make another one for my other car, but I can’t figure out the difference between the usb power on this thing and the usb power when plugged into the computer. As wwe all know, when plugged into the computer, the sansa goes into file transfer mode but on this thing it just stays in song play mode. Any ideas on what needs to be modified on a regular usb cord to stop it from going into file transfer mode. Thanks.

ok, i think I figured it out. i just took apart the sansa car transmitter and only the two outside connections on the mini usb plug have a connection, these are the ground and 5 volt connectors. I guess I’ll try to take the other wires out of a normal usb cable to see if i get the same responce.

Ok, I’ve figured out the usb power for the sansa. If you don’t want to buy the sandisk fm transmitter, which actually works pretty well, you can use any usb power cable by just isolating the two or three center pins. I just put a small piece of clear tape over the center three contacts on the mini-b plug and just like that, my sansa powered up in music playing mode. sweet! Make sure you do this on the cord and not the player, because you obviously can’t transmit songs to the player if you’ve covered the data pins. Good luck!

Everyone that had one “just die” try to reset it by taking out the battery and holding down the power button for 30 seconds. This fixed mine and I haven’t had a problem since. If this fails, just call sandisk customer support, they were very helpfull.

Hello
My still works OK. Hope always will. The second thing is…it supports lyrics too. I’ve tried to put lyrics into one song and Sansa showed the lyrics as I put it into a song. Great feature and no info on sandisk.com about this. Try it too. In windows media player import lyrics to the sond, set timing and transfer to Sansa and listen and WATCH… Great.

I had the same problem with my sandisk not turning on, but I was able to fix mine. This is from tech support: Remove the battery for 5 min, after this time is up, hold the power button for 10 sec. Hook the sandisk to your computer without the batter. Regardless of the result, remove it and put a ‘new battery’ in. It should work now.
This problem can be related to a dead batter, which causes one of capacitors to disregard the battery change. Therefore, the power-cycle above is needed to get it to work again.

This is a reply to post by “Rainan” dated Jan 2, 2006
I had a similar problem where the language got set to something other than English (looked like Kanji scripts) and this is how I fixed it.
Based on the user manual found that the option to change the “Language” can be accessed as follows :
Click on the Menu/Power button on the right side.
Scroll down to the 4th option using the scroll wheel.
Select the button “>>”.
Then scroll down to the 5th option on this menu. This is the “Language” menu option. Scroll up and down until you reach the appropriate language otpion and that should solve this problem.

But it would have been great if there was a button that would have reset the player to the factory defaults.

I wasnt sure what to do since my other MP3 has completly stuffed it, but now i will probably buy one of these!
I mean they are cheaper than an Ipod and they sound jsut as good, if not better, so thanks.

Thanks to Synic (msg 100 dtd 2/14/06) my Sansa E130 is back in operation. I thought it was GONE. Nothing I did would turn it on even though it had been real reliable for more than a month. What a relief! Just recently I started using a car adapter which looks like it might be a common theme among these players that suddenly won’t turn on. Maybe that’s what is eating batteries. Now I know how to get it going again! thanks.

I just got an E140 and I upgraded the firmware, but some of the tracks on my albums still are not in the correct order. Is there a way to make certain they will be in order? They have track numbers in the file name.

Thanks Gorp and Sync, I had the same problem with my E140 not turning on. Now it’s working great again! I have one more problem though. The Play Music -> By Genre menu doesn’t work as I expected. Instead of listing the genres completely it only lists the first letter of the genre. I have a feeling this is related to MS Media Player being the music app of choice. Has anyone else had this problem? Email me chris at hirtfamily dot net. I have the latest firmware installed.

Gorp, I have a question about making the E130 play while being plugged in via USB. Can you please provide a more detailed explanation. I think I understood you, but I don’t see how I could fit a tiny piece of tape inside the mini-b connector on the 2 or 3 center leads.

I just picked up an e140 yesterday and this thing is friggen amazing. Best small MP3 player for the money.

NOTE: Check your firmware version before going and updating to the one that is linked above!
Go to menu>>information and make sure it is some number less than 1.0.01a. Mine lists 2.0.001a which is obviously more recent and thus should NOT be updated. As far as I can tell Sandisk has not yet posted this firmware on their site, which is pretty nutz since it already made its way into a unit I bought off the shelf.

I wouldn’t listen to the customer support people about firmware updates, especially since there are two different stories and the latest firmware (on my e140) is apparently not even posted. I’m hopeful that they will beef up the playlist functionality with a later firmware release.

To the guy with high power consumption on SD-hosted files: If you’re using 320kbit you should expect much worse battery life. That is reading twice as much info per song from the SD card as a 160kbit encoded file. “Standard” is between 128kbit and 192kbit depending who you ask, and a lot of the mp3 player manufacturers expect us to use high compression (even lower than 128kbit) to fit more music and get better battery life. Personally I can’t tell the difference once I get above 160.

Also, note that turning on the SRS wow features or using the maximum volume setting will significantly impact battery life.

One more thing to add on this:
Although bookmarking would be nice for MP3 files, this player makes up for it, somewhat, with the ability to fast-forward through a track quickly. As you hold the FF button, it moves forward at an accelerating pace until it finally lands on about 1 minute of FF for each second you hold the button. This is absolutely crucial if you have an mp3 such as a live recording which is not broken up by track.

My last mp3 player (rca lyra) did not have the ability to fast forward quickly at all and it was a huge pain.

I have a e130 and an m240. The e130 can not do mp3 or wma bookmark files. The m240 which i purchased for my mom and her audio books will do a bookmark on an wma file. While the player is playing the book/music, press the center button on the player. This creates a bookmark in the m240. It will restart at this point if the player is turned off. I just mention this in this forum because I read somewhere that NONE of the Sandisk sansa players will do a bookmark. This is incorrect.

Hope this helps someone that also comes across the same INCORRECT information that I did.

I have a Sansa e130 and it’s the best mp3 player I’v gotten so far! I’v had it for about a year, and it hasn’t died on me yet, great sound quality with head-phones out of the box, good looking, :p, and it’s very easy to download songs. No software downloading required! Just plug up the player, install it with realplayer and go! (I extremely recomend realplayer.) By the way, I know all the pictures on the web sites show it, looking like 4 in. but it’s much smaller! It’s about 2 and a half. The screen size is perfect and it’s very durrable. It even comes with a case! Order it from circuitcity.com! If you buy it at the store it’ll cost more.

I bought a second-hand Sansa e130 player weeks ago. I love it very much. The only complain is the much highlighted 17-hour life on a single battery. Mine not even 8 hours on a new battery. Wonder why. Other than that, Sansa e130 is simply better than other mp3 players of its class.

Everybody talking about it just dying, dont worry. I had it for less than a month and it did this. I if you contact sandisk online it is awesome. You can set up an ebox and they reply very quick, they gave me the tip about taking the battery out for 5 minutes then hold the power button for 30 seconds. I told them it didnt work 😉 because i wanted a new one, i didnt trust it. Plus, my screen was cracked! and they had nooo problem replacing it. Thyre very helpfull so just contct them and im sure you can get a new one or the power tip does work.

I have music and aa files (audibles) and I just cannot find how to get to the aa files via the menu. When there are just aa files on the player it plays them fine, I have no menu option under play music that says spoekn word, they are definately uploaded into the player as per audibles device manager, but I just cannot find them LOL!! help!

Audiable files should show up under spoken word in “Play music” categories. I’ve noticed that you can upload files to the unit but unless you let it sit connected for a while, the files will be on unit but unit will not find it.

Does anyone know if there are plans for a firmware update that would allow bookmarking on audiobooks? When I purchased this device I thought it was just a standard feature. I guess not. I think it’s great though. I love the fact that I can add more memory.

re: #124
There are no drivers available to download for Sansa e100 series which would enable you to use it on Win98. The only you can do is to download an USB 2.0 driver for Win98. I’ve read on some forum that it should solve the problem, but I didn’t do this (I have Win XP)

I also would really love to make bookmarks/resume on mp3 files. I listen to a lot of podcasted 30-min to 50-min radio programs. This is the one thing that disappoints me about my e130; otherwise, I’m very happy with it! Do you suppose that if we all complained loudly enough to customer service, they’d put out a firmware upgrade for us like they apparently promised in November?

Thank you, SO MUCH for this review, and these postings. They helped me to decide, and I bought one. I LOVE the sound, the ease of use, the fact that it requires no additional software, and it works great on my Mac. It even does a good job with the ID3 tags provided by iTunes. The earphones were a major pain, though. I spent 3 days trying to get everything to sound good – had a MASSIVE problem with vocals on most of my tracks. Turns out, I finally thought to try another set of earphones, and the sound was great – even with low bitrate files. The earphones were bad. SanDisk won’t replace them, as they claim they’re an accessory, and therefore not covered under warranty. This is a shame, since I’m sure they were included in the determination of their pricing – and I find them extremely comfortable. Alternate headphones, even of the least expensive variety are around $20, an expense I didn’t want to add, but it certainly improves the sound, immensely. One thing to note: I do find those earphones very comfortable – it appears Griffin Technology’s EarThumps may be of a similar design. Think I’m going to try them. Otherwise, it’s a great little player.

Hey,
Thanks to Tibor (post #99) I’ve started to explore the function. In my opinion the best program to put synchronized lyrics to mp3 and wma files is WinLyrics which runs with Winamp (it is a Winamp Plugin). It has a large database (but not enormous) and an easy interface. While using this program you will have to choose between two options to write synchronized lyrics into the mp3 file. You should use Lyrics 3.2 (the other type will not be seen on the player). Disadvantage of this plugin is that it last for 60 days (after that you’ll have to pay for it or crack it…).

I tried installing 2.0.0.01a, and my player (E140) shows 1.0.010A under “information” on the player. Just to be sure, I redownloaded and this time let the firmware install format my player…still the same.

Can’t notice any menu changes, resume still does not work with MP3 or WMA files.

I know that the .exe files aren’t simply mislabled, as 2.0.0.01a is about 2MB larger than the old 1.0.010A firmware.

I submitted a trouble ticket to SanDisk asking for a changelog, I’ll let you know if they respond. I’ll submit another asking why the firmware version doesn’t change on my info screen.

Hi guys! Reading through theese posts i fell in love with the player, but I’m scared shitless that it’ll brake down on me a week after I buy it. I’m from Europe and I don’t think that the local retailer has any warranty on it so I couldn’t return it after the purchase. And this worries me greatly. Should I buy or…? Please help…

Hey, I just had a similar experience with the firmware upgrade. In my case, I called tech support first to ask what changed. After going through two people (including one moron who just repeated that a firmware update “fixes bugs” no matter how clearly I phrased my request) I totally failed to get any sort of explict explanation of what the upgrade does. (the second one at least tried, but what I got back sounded suspiciously like the 1.0 upgrade) I installed it, and I can see ZERO difference. I even tested out a couple bugs I found that I knew about, and those weren’t fixed. (like how, if the albumtrack name is too long, it gets confused and stops correctly filing by album) And like Dan said, it didn’t update the version number.

For some reason, one of the tech supporters referred me to their “oem sales” e-mail address. So I sent the inquiry there. Since tech support is clearly outsourced, maybe someone actually AT Sandisk can help.

Thanks a million to “Synic Says”, post #100. I bought the E130 512MB and loved it. Then it died and would not revive the day before I was taking a 10 day overseas trip. I wanted to have MP3’s with me on my trip so I bought the E140 1GB style to take on my trip. Today, it died. I came across the fix on this blog via a Google search. I fixed my E140 Sansa, then I fixed my E130!

My sister doesn’t have an MP3 player but wants one. I guess she is getting my original E130.

can you tell me why i can’t update my firmware from 1.0.010e to 2.0.0.1e
i think i newer version of firmware in extras should be added simple game like in ipod (eg snake)it will improve ours mp3players 🙂 owner from poland.

This particular firmware updater contains 2 separate firmware versions within it. It detects which firmware your player has and applies the correct one. If your player had a 1.x.x firmware, then it will update it to 1.0.010. If your player had a 2.x.x firmware, it will update it to 2.0.001. The website now states this to avoid confusion.

It sounds like your player already had 1.0.010, so no change was made.”

Hey,
Can anyone tell me what TYPES of memory flash cards are compatible with Sansa e130, apart of course from SD cards. I heard that MMC memories would work too…
There are many subtypes of these (SD,MMC) cards available on market- would they fit and work?

My trouble ticket turned in to an RMA – after the third attempt to update the firmware, my player died and the “trick” of removing the battery and holding the power button, then connecting and disconnecting via USB didn’t revive it.

No answer on the difference between 1.xxxx and 2.xxxx….I’m guessing it is firmware for a couple of different models bundled together…but that’s just a guess.

I’ve tried to put the 2.xxxxxx on to my Sansa with 1.xxxxx. But you have to do it turning the player into a recovery mode. After that you will have version 2.xxxx as I have now. Take care, it will need to format the device, so save every file from Sansa to the PC.
Though some graphics are different (as by resource editor) there’s no change in it on the display, but as I can see, version 2.xxxxxx is a bit (big “bit”) faster as 1.xxxx was. I use 2.0 GB Sandisk Ultra II SD card and now with firmware 2.xxxxxx the powerup takes only a few second, not as in 1.xxxxx when it took one minute.
Tibor

Ryan, think these people gave you the wrong information because i tried too and i also cannot get it to wor….this is the e130 blog (512mb) so maybe they mistaked this for another one of sandisks mp3 players. if you have any information on how to do this PLEASE write in this forum becuase i really want to know haw to do this. IT WOULD BE VERY APPRECIATED.—> 🙂 Thanks

I, and some other people here, haven’t mistaken saying that Sandisk Sansa e130 and e140 player can display synchronized lyrics. This function isn’t mentioned in the manual, but, I assure you, exists.

Like it was said (Tibor, #99, mine, #134, Jonatas, #139) there are at least 3 ways to show lyrics on the mp3 player screen (in the Windows Media Player, in Winamp- plugin is called Winlyrics, and in VividLirycs). I use WinLyrics, so only in this program/plugin have I experience.

Try it out. When you still haven’t got results contact me: gwawrzyn at gmail dot com, and I will try to explain how to do it in mail.

to Cybermetal #150
Simply with device turned off, push and hold menu button and plug in the USB cord while still holding the menu button pushed. After a few seconds (5-15) the computer says that found a device in recovery mode. After that just run the firmware upgrade and the updater will show that you are going to fresh up the firmware in a recovery mode and it will ask you to allow formatting the device. After that the new firmware is loaded to the device and after this ends just turn on and try Information…my shows firmware 2.0.001 E. The startup speed is faster than before and my NiMH 1000mAh accu is still in the device from last Friday. Without this update I was not able to turn it on the second day with the same accu thanks to using external SD card. But now it’s fine.
Tibor

I think it might be a different radio frequency in japan and the all the rest internationally is the same… but i really don’t get any other frequencys ( from other countries so hmm…

Anyway i am going to try making a car charger ( that will also be able to be used as a regular wall charger ) by sing a usb hub, a usb cord modified ( said previously ), and a car lighter adapter for the car. I got this idea earlier form i think gorp so it we’ll see. i should have the stuff wihin the next week so i’ll post a link for a picture if it works

Also Thanks to greg (above) i got the lyrics to show up on the screen pretty darn well syncronized and its a pretty cool feature that sandisk ( as far as i know ) fail to mention in the manual.

Japan uses a lower frequency band for FM radio. If you select “International” I think your presets are erased and you can only tune 70-90MHz or so. If you are not in Japan, leave it set to tune 88-108MHz.

I have been running the unit off USB power (just power, no data) for a while. The battery does not charge when plugged in via USB (no overcharging!). I use rechargable batteries (~6 hours from a 700mAH cell) when portable, and the USB adapter I made (5v regulated onto the power pins only) when at home. I’m going to make another 12v->5v adapter for use when in my cars where I use a FM transmitter with it.

I tried to update my player in recovery mode like you described. But when I plug in my player the PC says it found a new device and connot find the drivers for it. Therefor the updater can not connect to it to update it. Please help!! and let me know if there is a trick that I am missing.

Hey everyone i bought the supplies to make the car/wall adapter and it worked.Now you can plug the sansa strait into the wall or into your car lighter. I made a quick website showing how to make it and those who don’t know how to make the usb cable that powers the sansa and go here as well.

I too got a 1.0 -> 2.0 update to work. The key is to get the SigmaTel STMP3500 recovery mode driver installed. (I got mine from the mass storage drivers install of Creative’s Muvo TX FM’s support page, which apparently uses the same main processor).

Once that’s working, a boot of the e130 into recovery mode loads the windows drivers, and the 2.0 firmware driver will find a player in “recovery mode ready” or something like that.

My first update failed, and I thought I had toasted my player, but I reloaded the 1.0 firmware via the same method, then reloaded the 2.0 and now everything’s fine. As always, there’s the potential for ruining your player here, so be wary. Also, this will format your player, so caution is advised here too. I think the recovery mode is implemented outside of the main firmware in the player, so this might be a good way to recover from any failed firmware update.

Is 2.0 better? Marginally. I still don’t see any bookmark support. The menus look exactly the same to me. Maybe it’s a little bit faster. I think the best feature so far is muting the audio output between track changes so there isn’t the faint chirping I used to have.

Thanks for the info. Just one question, do you need both versions of the firmware in order for the upgrade to work. Since you stated you needed to load both 1.0 and 2.0 on your player. I may need to get a copy of the 1.0.010 since I think I deleted mine. Please let me know what you think.

Yes, exactly as Bob wrote, you need SigmaTel STMP3500 driver installed. Can be found on the net. version 2.x is, as I see, much faster with 2GB card in a player and really the player is quiet when muted.
Tibor

Bob, how did you manage to reload the 1.0 firmware to the player after your failed installation? My player now displays only a blue screen, and I don’t know how to reload the older firmware unto it since the PC won’t recognize it. Any help would be appreciated.

My Genre doesn’t work very well. Only a few songs under each category and a lot of numbers with songs under them. Someone mentioned some tag. Does that put it in a category so the player recognizes the genre??
Can the tag be changed and if so how???
i’d like the music listed under a Genre so I can play just that Genre for different types of music. IE, country, Rock etc.

I found the answer to my question on the Genre.
After much searching I found out how to change the Genre to whatever you want to be and it’s easy.
Download a freeware program called MP3 File Editor. http://www.mp3fe.com/
You can change the Genre, Artist, Title of the song, Album and a bunch more stuff. Then put the song back on your Sandisk Mp3 Player or SD card and go to Genre and it’s what you defined it. It’s so easy.
Hope this helps.

SYnic, you are a lifesaver! Went to the gym last night and my Sansa E130 wouldn’t power on, tried everything, sent an email to Tech Support that I’m sure they haven’t even opened yet, but on a lark I did a Google search and stumbled upon SYNIC’s fix – it worked like a charm! I’m SO RELIEVED – was anticipating having to buy a new player, hassle with sending this one back, etc. THANKS!!

Ready for an updated review!
I’ve noticed how active this discussion is, and since it’s been so long since the initial review, I thought I’d open up to the group to see if someone felt like taking the time to write a new review of the E130. If you are interested, send me an email at editor (at ) livedigitally.com.

Thanx to Tibor & Bob!
I try to update firmware from 1.0.010E to 2.0.001E.. Well, on first try flashing i look on: Failed.. ok, i will try again, but error was always same: “Failed”…if i want power up my Sansa, display only blicking.Problem-solving
you must realy flash fw with this file FW 1.x and after done you can write flash version 2.xxx… I dont know what was wrong, but now working again, uff.
1. write 1.0.010E (i dont know why, but must)
2. write 2.0.001E (now is flashing OK)
3. enjoy 🙂
PS: sorry for my english, im from CZ. If anybody want help, can me write on my webpage in comments(also in Deutsch). home

Just bought my Sansa e250. It was working fine but decided to upload the latest firmware. Went from e200fw01.00.09 to e200fw01.00.12. I got a “Load main image failed” error and it says “Switch to Recovery mode”. I’ve tried just about everything above, but no luck. Are the recommendation above valid for the e250 player?

Thanks for the info on how to force firmware update to 2.x. Also during the update process I killed my e130 twice and the battery out hold center button trick worked like a charm so great info. Much thanks.

However I wanted to verify how much performance gain I got with the new firmware so I timed how long it took from the time I hit Menu until the first song was ready to play. With 1.x it took 33 seconds to create playlist of 309 songs. With 2.x it took, don’t bother sitting down ’cause you’ll just stand back up, 33 seconds.

I don’t know about the muting issue b/c I never really noticed it. I certainly wouldn’t risk boogering up my e130 again for basically nothing. I’d love to know what the difference is from 1.x to 2.x from Sandisk rather than anecdotal reports. Hopefully they’re working on something for the next 2.x release. In my opinion the e100 series is the best bang for the buck with external storage…nobody else seems to be doing it.

Here is are the instruction from Xaero for upgrading the firmware from 1x to 2x. He has sent me an email (Thanks again Xaero):

This is my process (before fw. 1.0.010e, after 2.0.001e) …this is for sansa e130 (btw, on my first try i can see new device named sansa e140 🙂 fw was wrong flashed. That is why i must first use same fw. flash file like original (fw 1.0.010e, i dont know why).

1. put together fw. 1.0.010e and 2.0.001e , download it (two files, both on oficial website sandisk, fw 1.x is here: http://sandisk.com/Assets/File/Downloads/firmware/sansa-1.0.010e.exe , i cannot find link on sandisk, but google find him)
2. make sure, that you have all files backed up. After flashig is Sansa absolute empy. Download driver for Creativ Muvo TX FM mass storage (on Creative website, this is necessarily for installing device in RECOVERY MODE) and install it.
3. get into recovery mod -> lock HOLD button, press and lock up power/menu btn., connect on USB ( continually have pressed menu/power), for approximately 5-10 sec you can see new device found ( STMP3500 or thereabouts). Windows now install driver for this device(it use Creative driver).
4. Now you can try update your device with fw. 2.0.001e(confirm caution). If successful, you have it. If you see message: failed, dont worry.(i have tried 5 advances, but with same effect: failed….)
5. now is time for resuscitation: so, use flash number one(1.0.010e), program waiting on your Sansa, you must get into recovery mod and program begin with writing flash into Sansa (you can see progress). After this flashing you have same flash version like at beginning. (with flashing at version 1.x i have not problem, no failed messages)
6. in this step you write on Sansa flash version 2.0.001e, simply run flash updater, connect Sansa(in recovery mode), run updating. This step is equal like step n. 4, but with one difference: now pass flashing successful 🙂 So, now you can get into menu, information and you can see new version 2.x, enjoy.

differences between version is:
booting is faster, and how wrote Tibor, its BIG faster with 2GB SD card.
absolutely mute between tracks (thats is why i go to updating)
longer run on battery (wote Tibor, with 2GB SD card)

You mentioned in the review that the songs on the external memory card are merged into one database. This is where I am having trouble. The songs I have saved on the memory card are not being merged – I cant play them on my devise. AmI doing something wrong??

E250 – how do you go into recovery mode with the sansa E250? i tried holding the power button with the unit off, then connecting the usb, while still holding the power button for 15+ seconds, nothing is happening?

I have an sansa e140 myself
I am suggesting from Sandisk web site now, there are two firmware releases, that are probably functionnaly equivalent 2.0.001 and 1.0.010. The obscure reason why they have two differents release could be a hardware minor difference between 2 differents minor revision of the player hardware???

Without official information, i would suggest not to try to force an update from release 1.x to 2.x. It could be a very risky process to ruin the device with about no real benefit at all when we look at some thread here…

I have a e140 sansa player for 3 weeks now and like this little unit. I am using it for mainly wma files support (no mp3). From what i have found, the device firmware is more stable for mp3 than wma use. Anyway, here are a small list of bugs i have found so far and some workarounds for firmware 1.0.010a that i have.

BUG#1: In many situations, the ALBUM name could be corrupted. For a total of 409 songs, around 83 of them were assigned with a corrupted ALBUM name! Some album were correct, some of them have song splits in two different album container. Part of the songs with the correct album name, and the other part of the songs had a “Unknown Album” tag in the library. So when you select such an album for playback, you get part of the songs in the playback which is very annoying. The other missing songs are all packed with other songs from other album (83 songs in this case) in the “Unknown Album” album tag name (so this makes them unaccessible or listening possible for the whole kits of 83 songs: they cannot be played back anymore with the other songs from original album!!!)

Workarounds:

A- Album that have least than 10 songs never have this problem (limit each album to 9 songs maximum). This workaround is working but unfeasable in practice because most of the CD albums have more than 9 songs…

B- Album with no track tags seem to work correctly and do not have the problem. But you loose the possibility to play the tracks in original album order (only default alphabetic ordering is possible)

C- This is the best workaround for the problem. I have noticed that all the album that has the problem have more than 9 tracks and also the tags fields in the wma for them was in a specific order. In these album in general, the ALBUM field is located after the TRACK field (which i think the TRACK field has the biggest influence in the problem). So to correct the problem in this workaround, we have to rewrite all the wma tags of the “defective” albums (defective for the e140, but not for a PC) to put them in an order that seem to work all the time. So take mp3tag software, export all the TAGS in the files name in this order: (TITLE – ARTIST – ALBUM – TRACK – YEAR – GENRE – COMMENT). Then DELETE all the tags from all the wma files (there is a function to delete the tags). After that recover the tags from the filenames that will recreate the tag fields in this specified field order). Than, if you write back all these defective albums in the e140 player, all albums will be corrected!!! But this workaround is not usuable for everybody because it is complex to achieve…

D- If only one album for an artist exist in the library, instead of searching by album name which is corrupted as an example, seach by artist in the library and you will see 2 album titles, the correct one and the one with “Unkown Album” title. Just select “Play ALL” to play everything and you will play all songs from the original album. This trick is not working if there is more than one real album for this artist because it will play everything. But it will not solve any playing order problem…

BUG#2: Album are often not played in original track ordering from the original CD they came from. For some reason, some album plays in the correct track order specified, and some not even if the track information is available in the wma tag fields.

Workarounds:

A- All albums that have least than 10 tracks with the track field written with a single digit as 1,2,3,4,5,… are played in the correct original track order. This workaround is limited to album with least than 10 tracks (9 max). So all album encoded with two digits track number has 01,02,03,04,05… could be rewritten to a single digit and this will correct the problem.

B- Album that have more than 9 tracks even, if track has single digit for tracks 1 to 9 do not order correctly. Tracks with field bigger than 9 will not sort correctly by track order, neither aphabetically! Tracks value like 10,20,11,21,12,22,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 is an example for the track ordering sequence i got for an album. I cannot explain exactly what is the logic behind this ordering sequence, but it was not alphabetic neither. It is like the track value is not converted to a number before trying to sort it in the correct sequence order??? A temporary incomplete workaround for this is to rewrite the tags by using a 2 digits track number, this will allow to order the track in the alphabetic mode (track info won’t be used anymore. Same result is achieved by deleting the track field in the wma files). This will not give original track ordering, but will give alphabetical ordering better than nothing, and will have the advantage of keeping the track info in the wma files, in waiting of a e140 firmware update… Here where the fields order present in the example for album decribed above with this curious ordering (TITLE, ARTIST, COMMENT, ALBUM, TRACK).

C- I also think, even if i didn’t tried this one, that removing the track information and rename all the song titles of the album with a form like this “NN – TITLE” will also played alphabetically in correct original track number at the same time because the track number is embedded in the title field, so it will be sorted alphabetically because no track info is available in the track field. But this solution is very ugly and destroy the tags in an ugly manner especially if wma files are played elsewhere that the e140 (like in winamp), you would get ugly titles!

BUG#3: Title/Artist/Album that are beginning with THE are not sorted alphabetically by the letter T, but by the letter of the second word in the title/artist/album. This is probably a Feature and not a bug, but this one i dislike a lot. It would be better sorting by letter T of THE. If the user didn’t like it, the THE could be remove from the title and the sorting could be done also by the second word easily. The actual implementation gives no choice: THE as first word of a title/artist/album is never considered for the sorting, which gives a lot of title displayed in a curious alphabetic ordering when you check titles alphabetically in the unit.

Workarounds:

A- Remove all THE as first word in the artist name album or title directly in wma file tags. This is not interesting workaround because it will destroy the original content of the tag. It would be better to have an option in the setting of the e140 to activate this feature or not if not a bug…

BUG#4: Files are catch with an incorrect year. They seem to be added in the library with a 2005 default year. This is a real problem. If you are trying to play all 2005 songs year in the library and half of the title in the library have the YEAR tag incorrectly read, you will get in bonus all these files (339 in my case!) to be played including the real one that have year set to 2005. This make the year sorting unusable. Only 70 files/409 have the Year tag unset in the wma files and a few for 2005. I am getting 339 files in year 2005!!!

Workaround:

I don’t know any workaround yet for this one…

BUG#5: GENRE sorting unusable for wma files. Only first letter of the GENRE tag is shown.

Workaround:

I don’t know any workaround yet for this one…

I am hoping for a incoming firmware update to help stabilize the wma support of the unit. I didn’t make a lot of tests with mp3 files, but it seem to be more stable. Especially for mp3 id3v2 tags with iso8859 character…

Anyway i reaaly like the unit if the firmware was better, it is much better unit than my previous mp3 player…

Here are some information about my own personal audio settings for the e140…

The default settings when SRS WOW is ON is too much agressive. Especially the 3D feature will distord music vocals on many songs (but not all of them). I have tried to find a setting that i would like with the builtin earphone. Even if many complains that these earphone are not the best quality for music hearing, i prefer finding a setting to use them because these earphone has a very big quality in my opinion: because they have a mushroom design and fit inside your ears, you can wear them a complete day long without any ear pain at all which is very very good. I didn’t get this for any of the earphone i have tried in the past, from hifi system earphone to other external ear mp3 player earphone.

So my wish was to find a compromise for music that i could live with and still using the default earphone. These units are very high frequency response and very bad low frequency response. Without the custom equalizer and the SRS WOW feature, the music is not a nice sound experience with the builtin earphone 🙁

But let’s try to adjust the equaliser to my taste with the SRS WOW feature.

Weakness to try to correct. Low frequency do not get out of this earphone easily! Too much high frequency in the music

Comments: when activated, the SRS WOW feature seems to boost the high/low frequency of music giving problems having a well balanced mid frequency (vocal). This is the reason the focus was made to MID for trying to emphise the vocal a bit, but not too much to not hear high frequency too much. The SRS 3D setting in my opinion could not be tolerate higher than position 3. It gives some reverb to the music and enhance a lot the listening experience (sound is less dull), but it cause distorsion in some vocals of singer in specific case that i could not tolerate. So i push it as high as i can tolerate the distorsion to get a pleasant effect). TRUEBASS is to boost a lot the low frequency of these earphone that are a real weakness.

I have tried again to boost the lowest frequency at maximum to fight again these nice earbuds and also the vocals, to achieve enough mid frequency level to deal with the problem of SRS WOW feature that boost the music and makes the vocal difficult to hear, lost in a well boosted music background. You can see that i didn’t boost a lot the high frequencies. There are enough high in these earbuds to not try to emphize them more 🙂

The result for me (it is a matter of taste). A very pleasant sounding experience. Even 96 kbits CBR wma files 44khz stereo are sounding interesting now with the earbuds, much better than without any correction (and with the default settings). The music has a much more low frequency you can clearly hear, with good vocals (but the vocal is still a bit lower than the music background). Sure it is not hifi, but i can live with it now for a portable player of this price range and with the interesting earphone design, i can listen more than 8 hours in a row without any ear pain at all.

re 181. on the recovery problem with the e260.. had same problem.. here was the fix for me on another forum for the e206

OK, looks like I got it fixed. Seems like they are still trying to figure it out at Sandisk.

I called tech support and first they said to return it to the store for exchange. Called a couple hours later and they told me they just got an internal memo for a procedure to get the E200 into recovery mode.

– Power off the unit
– Slide the hold switch to the lock position,
– Hold the “record” button on the side pressed
– Plug in the USB port

They said that should work. Well it didn’t for me. After the call, out of desperation, I tried the same procedure above, but this time I also pressed the “menu” key before plugging in the USB and that did it. I then reloaded version 12 and it has been working great so far. So far I’ve just loaded and played music and pictures on he device and no problems so far.

If any of you are still having problems getting into recovery mode, try this procedure and let us know if it worked.

…. for me i did the above without the menu option.. then it went to recovery mode. said change usb to mtp mode… I re loaded the firmware… disconnected the usb.. turned off the player. then it came one and was all well

The differnce I found between the 1.0 and 2.0 firmware for the e140 is that its does load faster on power up, but not when you’ve made files changes. It only starts faster if there have been no changes to the drive. I also found that the SRS WOW settings are better. I used to have to turn the Trubass all the way off because it sounded like crap and now with 2.0 it sounds alot better. But that is all I have noticed so far. Plus better battery life and no static between songs.

I have an e140 with firmware revision 2.0.0001a and was thinking about buying a 2Gb SD card to go in it. Does anyone know if this version of the firmware for the e140 has the problem of using excessive amounts of power or taking a long time to read on startup.

If so can someone please tell me where to get an updated version of the firmware, and how to install it.

I have 409 wma files on my e140 unit with firmware 1.0.010a, if i am changing no files, and start the unit, it will take from the time i am pressing the power button to the time it is ready to play (the current song is diplayed in pause mode), total: 9 secs. Can you give me an idea what faster mean in your situation with the 2.x version?

I doubt very much that your player takes only 9 seconds to start. Just the Sandisk and Sansa logos themselves take 10 seconds to load. My player has 185 mp3s in the internal storage and 71 mp3s on a 512mb memory card, and my player takes 12 seconds to load all the way. Maybe the player loads faster when you have wma’s and not mp3’s. Having said all that I think very 1.0.010a and 2.0 are almost the exact same.

Hey man, who are you to decide what is true on my side and what is not. It is 9 secs exact timing with chrono in hand (with 409 wma files) Sure the first time you are installing these files on the unit, it is longer… After that, 9 secs every power up!

I strongly suggest that you remove you’re external sd memory card. There are a big difference between speed of different branded flash memory card. It could be an impact on the difference (SD card could be much slower than internal flash memory). With my old mp3 player, when i was using an external SD card, the battery life cut more than half and the speed to read the external songs was not as fast as internally… I don’t know if it is the case for the e140…

The other thing that may be could contribute to the longer speed is the type of file tag you are using?

MP3 tag ID3V1 are stored at the end of files, this will probably require that all files in the unit are red before checking the tags…

If you are using mp3 tags ID3V2 only, they could be stored at the beginning which i guess would be a lot faster because it will need only to read the beginning of the files.

For wma files, the same story is true, the tags are saved at the beginning of the files.

I cannot be sure this is the meaning of your slowliness, but it is fast enough on my side.

Anyway, for my needs, 96kbs 44khz stereo wma v9 is the way to go with this unit. The quality is as good as mp3 128 kbs and will allows to hold in 1gb 409 songs in my situation, which is much better that i can get with mp3 128 kbits. Sure this is not hi-fi, i am using at least mp3 192kbits for car/home stereo, but with the kind of audio quality we can have with the included earbuds, it seem enough for me to do the tradeoff i get much more room for songs.

I have killed my Sansa
I tried to update firmware in recovery mode, and after that my Sansa only shows blue empty screen. I can’t to restore old firmware because my comp doesn’t see Sansa even in recovery mode. Is there any way to back it to life? Help, please!

I’ve had my Sansa e130 fro two days now, and I have mixed feeeelings about it. I like it despite it lack of a playlist feature (not including Favorites), because of it is light, small form, and the SRS WOW feature. However, for some reason it keeps erasing my Favorites list! This is really annoying, because I like hearing some songs in a certain order and it takes a long time to set it up that way! Second off, the battery life for me has not been that great. I’ve tried timing it, and it i thinks its about 5 to 6 hours. Thats about one day per battery. Does that sound scary to anyone else, the fact that you have to change batteries ever day?

My last problem is the worst offender. It takes over a minute to turn on! Thats f’ing crazy! I have a 1 gb SanDisk SD card, and from the second it says “Checking External Memory” to being able to actually play a song, it takes over a minute! I was under the impression that it only did that if I changed the songs on the SD card, but it takes the same amount of time regardless of if I change songs or not. I only have 135 songs on it, and I have done the version to upgrade.

Is there anyway I can get around these problems? I don’t think I’ll be able to keep this thing is it goes through a battery everyday, and takes so long to start up, and keeps erasing my favorites list. Please, any help would be greatly, greatly appreciated.

Check the kbps of your MP3s. After checking various kbps I have settled down to 128 kbps VBR (112 kbps is still ok, but I can see (hear) some differences between 128 and 112 on some songs). I use Winamp plugin:

It has good options for quality, tag editing, filename cutomization, etc.

Quote from manual:
Up to 17 hours of continuous playback using one AAA battery when MP3 music plays at 128 kbps with SRS WOW in off mode.

For #189, MisterMoonlight

Thanks, for your equalizer settings. Do update me if you further manage to fine tune it (I am not a expert in fine tuning the equalizer :( In Winamp, too I use the presets. I prefer "Soft Rock"..It is suitable for rock, soft rock or slower/pop songs).

I use Sony headphones and I prefer SRS WOW off. Also it looks like a power hogger.

My sandisk e130 died, call the support (1) (866) 726 3476. First they will tell you what you should do. If nothing works, they will send you an email explaining what to do to send the e130 back to them and they will give you another for free.

I don’t understand your problem with the favorite list. It is working perfectly well on the e140. I never loose it. There is one thing i know that could makes you loose your favorite list, it is to remove the presence of the files in the unit that you selected for favorite List. If you don’t use an SD card and you keep your songs in the unit flash for a long time (weeks) you won’t loose your favorite list.

May be some of your favorite tunes are from the SD card and you are removing it from the device some time (this could make you loose them)???

I have a small hint you may try. All the seetings of the unit, the playlist, the library are kept in hidden files on the device. I have already tried a small trick before. You backup these files on your PC and when you mess everything around, you simply copy them back to the unit. You have to take care that most of the settings are saved in these files, so if you change something on the settings of the player, and forget to backup on the PC the new settings files, you will loose your changes. I have already use this small trick to recover the equalizer and WOW setting after a test upgrade to the same firmware release (this will usually erase the settings and return to default) and it work flawlessy (i don’t advice to do this if you are changing the firmware revision of the unit to something else thow…)

Here are the files:
settings.dat
music.lib
music.sec

These files are hidden files, so you have to set explorer on your PC to see hidden files and they are located at the root level of the first drive of the sansa unit. My experience told me (and the name of the files also 🙂 ) that the first one is related to the equalizer settings, WOW settings and i guess also the favorite playlist i guess (???) The 2 other files are probably related to the music library build from the ID3 tags from the file. If you don’t change any SD card, neither any file on the unit, recovering these three files from a backup on your PC should do the job.

For the battery life, i would test without using any SD card cause it could be power hungry. One suggestion that i am using is to buy three 900mah aaa nimh rechargeable cells and keep them with you all the time. That what i am doing, so i always have battery power available and charge them at night (pretty fast to charge these small cells). It is not expensive at all and much better than using devices with a litium battery like ipod that the battery is very expensive, some you must plug them to usb to charge and the player is not available in these situations. With nimh aaa, no problem, you just changing the cell and there you go ready in a minute and cost most to nothing.

I have battery life at least double than that (10-13 hres) but using only slow bitrate files without SD card and with always WOW ON.

I guess that the slow loading time is related to using an external SD card (these card may be slow). I don ‘t use an SD external card, 409 songs are on my e140 i turn on at 9 secs, ready to play (i almost never change any song on it)…

Did you update your player to the last revision with the official procedure from sandisk?

Thanks a lot for the information. I’ll see if I can adjust the bitrate of my songs/get rechargable batteries.

I think I might know what is happening to my favorites. Instead of plugin in my player using USB to read the card (waste of battery life), I plug the SD card into a built in reader on my computer. Could that cause some problems? Its weird though, because it never messes with my WOW, equilizer or time settings.

I don’t remove songs, only add, and sometimes relocate them to different folders. But it takes the same time to load even when I don’t make changes.

I had posted #199…I agree the post turned out to be very ugly 🙂 I mean the formatting et all!

BTW…I am using your equaliser settings with SRS WOW off on my Sony earphones. I am using Sony earphones cos its is more robust and suitable when I am travelling. A few guys were complaining they ended up breaking the original Sansa earphone wires. So I am preserving the Sansa headphones for home use.

Also, your settings turned out to be a real improvement after I was using the “Pop” preset for a week. (this is on my Sony headphones)…cos going towards “Rock” preset was getting very unpleasant on these headohones.

Others, if you have some other custom settings and are really happy with it…do share it. I listen to almost all genres…Rock, Soft rock, Electronic pop, Hip hop, etc. So anything might be useful!!

I suggest you to reread the previous post. Removing the card from the player will make the song disapear to the player. If you turn on the player with the card removed, your player do not see the files anymore and will flush the favorite list (because files not there anymore)

Do not remove the sd card. Put it in the unit, plus the unit through usb, download the files to the internal/sd card. Do not remove the sd card (never) and do not plug the unit in usb later. Turn it on a couple of time. Make a favorite list of a couple of tunes. And let see if you still loose the playlist without unplugging the sd card, neither changing anyfile through usb neither. I guess you won ‘t loose it, this is what i am doing…

Normal, it is a feature, the fact that you do not loose the equalizer settings tells me that you don’t have any problem 🙂

Kust try what i suggest, leave the sd card in place and listen to the same music files for a couple of week without removing the sd card…

Just connect the unit through usb and you will see the unit map as 2 drives on your computer (look with explrer). Than browse the first drive letter and you will see the files. Delete them with explorer…

used a wired fm modulator instead of wireless fm to hook my e130 up to the car, works flawlessly. now — how can i use the cig lighter to power it? does anyone know if a usb car adapter would work, like this:

Of course you must plug in ‘prepared’ cable to the item you’ve given link to…(sorry for not mentioning it). It has the proper voltage, so it should be all right. And you mustn’t buy new cable if you manage to connect set with cable which was in the box (it may be short).

hi, greg: that sounds great. and i saw one of those cables at staples today, though they’re much cheaper on ebay.
so have you done as you suggest, managed to tape the two middle prongs on the A end? man, does that look tough.
btw, what happens if you don’t tape the A end?
finally, the short cable that comes with the m130 — do you know what’s inside that bump thing in the middle of the cable? and is that something that’s going to be a problem with an aftermarket cable?
thanks again for your help.

I just bought one and cannot get win98se to see the device! So I am not able to get any songs loaded on the e140. Can anyone direct me on how I can get it to work with win98. If there is a download I need I cannot find it on the Sandisk site, please send me a link if you know of one that works. Thanks much.

Yes, I’ve done it myself and my Sansa works (by covering with sth two middle prings/pins you can also power the player on with a computer USB port). What happens when they are not covered (in car)? To tell the truth I don’t know…When I realised that it can be done on my laptop I’ve transferred the idea to the car without checking what would happen if…Thinking of it I suggest that the player won’t start at all. Hiding two middle pins when connecting to computer you avoid the digital link between player and computer. Two other pins are only power supply.

The ‘bump’ in the inbox cable can be two things: a filter which could clean the interference in the power supply or (more likely) an additional weight for the cable (nothing more:) ). I’m thinking of the second because I have bought another USB cable which hasn’t got this bump and works fine (with my Sansa too:) )

Try to find other topic-connected posts on this blog. Ryan has a lot of experience in modifying his Sansa (post #166).

If you look on the box of the sansa e140, the minimum requierement for operating system is windows 2000. Win98 is not supported. It would need a driver anyway to be seen as a drive on windows 98. And you won ‘t find it on sandisk, because… it doesn’t exist!

An operating system upgrade is more expansive than the sansa unit itself 🙂
And the minimum hardware requierement for running xp or win 2k is bigger than windows 98. So it could cost also to “refurbish” the computer hardware not to loose computer performance in the upgrade path.

These are a lot of $$$ that you can afford a much better unit than the sansa for all these amount of money.

I bought my e140 last week (115 euro, Ireland), and have experienced problems with track ordering already. I tried including track numbers with the title as ##-TITLE; but now the internal catalog is corrupt (ie, artists and albums are mixed up).

My next moves will be: use mp3 only, or edit the catalog’s hidden files manually.

The problem seems to be mostly with wma files (will Media Player sync using mp3 instead??).

Thank you for your gentle comment. My ultimate goal is to make the sansa e100 products alive and hopelly cause new firmware updates from sandisk for the unit. More people buy it and ask to sandisk to correct the bug, more chance we have to enhance this little player i cannot live without it now 🙂 I suggest that you leave a support request for your problems ( 🙂 ) on the sandisk web site!

1-Just for curiosity, did you try do flush the catalog and rebuild it from scratch (connect to the computer with usb and delete the files “music.lib
music.sec” and then discconect usb and power on. This will recreate the library (is the library still corrupted)?

2- Next step, i suggest you (because i did it myself and this solve a lot of the problems i had with wma files) to rebuild the tags from scratch (especially if the files are from different sources). Just take a look in detail to post #188 i have made and used the nice freeware mp3tag to do this. I suggest for the inital try to create the tags like this with this ordering (TITLE – ARTIST – ALBUM)
Recreate the tags and do not add in first attempt the track info in the title. Then lets see if the albums are displayed correctly. Normally, you would have correct info for artist, album, title (it would play in alpha order…). After that, retry to recreate the tags from scratch by adding the track info to the beginning of the titles. Let’s see if you still get corruption after doing like explain in step 1 above to recreate the library. It is very important to recreate the tags from scratch with the correct tag field ordering order (you can verify the tags filed ordering in the wma file by doing properties with windows explorer on a wma file and looking of the order the fields that are displayed in the wma)

By cleaning my tags, i was able to achieve correct album, artist,title info for all my 409 songs in the device for me. Just missing the track ordering for me now that i’ll hope a firmware update will correct soon.

Give me some details if you succeded or not to get track ordering by embedding track number in the title

If you do not change any song in the device since the last powerup (i don’t know if this trick is working while using an external SD card???), you can save some few seconds of waiting booting before pressing hte play key for playing music where you left off at last power off (in music mode). This trick was tested with firmware 1.0.010A

Press the power key, you will see first the “Sandisk” logo, waits for the next screen, you will see the “sansa” logo screen, then press an hold the play key for a 0.5-1sec than release it. The player will leave the “sansa” logo, will try to recreate the library scanning for some files changes and as soon as this process is finished will begin to play the current song (He He). With this trick, i don ‘t need to wait for 9 secs everytime after power up before seeing the current song title displayed on screen and pressing play at this time. Only about 5 secs waiting is necessary and i can setback the unit in my pocket and it will start to play alone (He He don’t laugh, i hate to wait about something!). I don’t know if this trick is also working when the device is recreating a complete music library for 30 sec for example???

For Windows 98SE users, you might try the USB driver NUSB22E.EXE. You can find it via Google. This seems to be an generic USB external disk driver. My son got his W98 system to recognize a Creative Muvo, so it should see an E130.

BTW, I discovered that upgrading to v2 from v1 caused some problems. One of my PCs would no longer connect properly to the e130. So I went back to the latest v1. It appears that there must be a hardware reason for the two firmware upgrade tracks.

As i already said in a previous post, this is my expectation that it is not safe to go from one release to the other (there is a hardware change between both release). If it was safe, why should sandisk would keeps customer with release 1.x going to release 2.x???

Anyway, functionnaly, i am sure that both release 1.0.010 and 2.x are same in functionality because these are upgrade in the same package release at same time (or everything that could be done in release 1.x like 2.x is there)…

Bottom line (for me):
Using 4G SD, the external card portion has sped up considerably – 30+ seconds down to 5 or so – but the “e130” screen still takes a LONG time (no longer than before). The SanDisk screen takes a lot less time.

Regrettably, I didn’t time everything ahead of time; but I am now willing to keep the e130 whereas I was about to get rid of it because of the SD detection time.

BTW, full boot up time with NO music on the player (and no SD): 8 seconds.

With a 4G card with a couple thousand tracks (and a couple movies and stuff): right at one minute… too long, but almost half what it was.

I’ve tried to find the driver you’ve mentioned, but with no results. I was searching via google and yahoo but the only hits were links to forums on which people were talking about it.
Can you give me a link to this driver or send it by mail: gwawrzyn at gmail dot com.

Can someone tell me…
Will be there firmware update to e130 for resuming mp3 pause after power off the player ?

Because I can see differences in comments:

When I read this, then my reaction was “YEEES !!!” :

I called Sandisk, and the lady said that they were working on a firmware update to get the bookmark/resume feature to work

But few comments later, when I read this, my reaction was : “****** 🙁 ”

The Sansa e100 series does not support a bookmarking or resume function for MP3 files, only for Audible files....
As of this time there are no plans for a further firmware update to the e100 series that would attempt to make resuming MP3 files possible on that MP3 player.

For some reason, my e130 is scrambling my id3 tags everytime I put new music on it. When that happens, I just delete the setting files from the Sansa and it rebuilds the library fine. I upgraded from the 1x firmware to the 2x, which did not fix the problem. But since I use a 2GB card, this was a good move as the player starts much faster.

Jack: one guy had same problem. I you try get into recovery mod and you have battery into sansa, remove it. How he wrote, with battery cannot PC detect his sansa. Without battery yes. I dont know any more solution.

I thought it would be cool to upgrade the firmware of my Sansa e140 from version 1.x to version 2.x. I followed the instructions from the previous posts and the firmware failed to load each time. My player got to the point where it would not start up, windows would not detect it, and would not enter recovery mode. I thought I fried my player when I started noticing that if the battery was not in, I was able to enter recovery mode (without the battery!). So if you can’t seem to get you player working I would suggest starting in recovery mode and then loading the firmware all without the battery. I hope this saves someone a lot of time – because I sure spent a lot of it trying to recover from this.

My son’s e130 stopped working and thanks to all the input here it works again. I removing the battery (a new one) and held the power button for 30 seconds. Replaced the battery, hit the power button and wah-la. All is good and he even has all his stored music. We have a new favorite site.

SRS on or off seems to make very little difference to power consumption – according to multimeter readings. Bit rate of music and whether WMA or MP3 appears to make a much more significant difference (varies between 100 and 150mW).

Anyway, i cannot live without SRS feature… When tuned correctly, it is a must when using the builtin earbud and slow bitrate files that sound dull without it (like wma 96 for example or mp3 128 kbits).

There is also a huge difference of autonomy when using nimh cells vs alkaline good cells. It is much longer with alkaline (few hours with nimh 900ma. Hint is to have a couple in the pocket so you can change anytime)

I guess also that using sd memory card will impact a lot on the power consumption. If you have a change to measure, it could be interesting. Then, fast bit rate songs (192, 256 kbits) from sd memory should be a battery killer i guess… The volume level your listen also should impact a bit…

well.
my e130 i had for 3 months.
and then the next day i try to turn it on and the battery..okay the whole thing starts making a sizzling noise..
and then sometimes it will turn on and only stay on for 10 seconds.
help anyone..?
what a piece.

I think most decent alkaline AAAs store about 1200mAh these days compared to at most 900mAh for typical NiMH. That is a difference of less than 13 hours playback with NiMH compared to the lab tested 17 hours with alkalines (playing 128kbps mp3). Still NiMH seem to get better every year. SD card use appears to have only a small impact on power consumption (I use 2GB Sandisk Ultra II) compared to that caused by bit rate and MP3 vs. WMA. Volume level makes very little difference.

Alkaline mAH comparison is not directly applicable, depends on a the specific device minimum voltage tolerance. IOW, alkaline’s last few hundred mAH are lower voltage than when NiMH is considered drained already. For a flashlight that may be useful but most IC depend on minimum of 0.7V just to overcome silicon junction drops.

I would not worry about battery usage of any features. If you want SRS or SD card or high bitrate, you don’t be happy doing without them just to save from carrying a mere spare AAA battery.

Regarding prior posts, to make a power cable one doesnt’ need to tape over those pins, just get one of the USB adapters that supplies aux power, like to a external HDD enclosure. If you plugged a standard USB cable into a DIY car charger or other device that doesn’t have data + & – on the USB pins, that too would work.

The large “lump” in the cable is a ferrite, useful in filtering out high frequency noise in bad environments. It can work without except in extreme conditions.

Contrary to another post, we can’t assume there is an end-user reason not to flash FW2 on a FW1 device. Sandisk may have simply not tested it and thus won’t guarantee it and due to built-in flasher mechanisms, the default code before Sandisk ever got ahold of the flasher routine, it doesn’t flash different firmware IDs.

I would be interested to know of others that have tried 4GB or larger SD cards. This player does suport FAT32, which was one of the issues in >2GB card, BUT Sandisk only mentions up to 2GB support. A valid test would load the card with over 2GB of files and then whether all those beyond 2GB boundary were accessible.

The point I was trying to make was that whilst most people are used to NiMH AA batteries lasting significantly longer than AA alkalines, the same is not true for AAA where the NiMH hold significantly less charge than their alkaline equivalents as is the experience of previous posters. You are right that the comparison between alkaline and NiMH is not a precise science but that doesn’t mean that a comparison shouldn’t be attempted.

I agree with you that avoiding features in order to achieve battery savings is pointless. I provided some empirical data to show this. Avoiding external cards, keeping the backlight off (instead of on for short bursts every button press), using low volume, turning the player off every time or using auto power off with a short duration (instead of leaving the player in pause for say half an hour) all have only a small impact on battery consumption compared to the use of MP3 over WMA and the use of lower bitrates over higher ones. These latter are not player settings but describe the format of your music collection – which you are unlikely to change just in order to save a little on batteries. If you really want to save batteries, only use the radio (just 90mW consumption), but this defeats the object of having purchased an MP3/WMA player !!

Music format taken together with the comparison between alkalines and NiMH for AAAs provide some explanation for why previous posters might not get particularly close to achieving the lab tested 17 hour battery life listed in the product specifications.

I share your interest in whether 4GB cards would work. Perhaps doktorx (post #229) would relate their experiences with using a 4GB card.

Thanks to all the people who have posted on this site, it has been handy to read the posts.

I have owned this player (e140) for about a month now and been happy with it.

Minor complaints similar to what others have noted include no book marking, but not a major problem for me as I only listen to music (and not long audio books)

Thanks to the guys who suggested taping the middle two pins of the USB cable, and running it off the car lighter with no battery -great for long trips! But as far as I can tell, it does not remember where it last played every time you turn the car on and off unless you leave the battery in. So it resets to the first song on the player.

I am yet to get a SD memory card for it but have just ordered a 2gb one off ebay.

For those who have complained about the lack of playlist function I don’t see it as an issue. As long as your mp3s are tagged using (artist, year, song, genre etc) you can play via these modes. The genre one is particularly useful as you can name it what ever you want to describe the type of music you want to listen to. You’ve also got the shuffle function.

Mine has been frustrating. It periodically refuses to update library of new files. Tries to play old files that are not on unit.

The last time I dueled with it I reflashed my 1x firmware with current upgrade and formated. After that, I get random powerdowns on either internal or external power, often at same points but then sometimes not.

“My sansa had a near death experience. The battery was low when I powered it down. The next day it wouldn’t come up – changed the battery to a fresh one – no luck reviving it. Tried a couple of new batteries – no luck. Then went back to the original battery – no luck ; decided to try again after putting the cover back on – it magically came on up. (I recall having tried the fresh batteries with AND without the cover on).”

That is EXACTLY the same experience I’ve been having with my E130. Also, the volume will mysteriously get higher for seemingly no reason. Gremlins indeed. Haven’t emailed Sandisk yet but just about to.

I downloaded a book from Audible to my player onto the external card and it won’t play. It shows in the player but when I start it the player freezes on pause. Do I have to put this on the internal memory to get it to play?

So, can anyone confirm or deny whether the 4GB SD cards work with the e100 series players? I’d love to have a 5GB Sansa, but I don’t really need a $75 card I can’t use… (Its too small to use as a coaster unless I drank very very tiny drinks…)

I bought an e140 the other day and did the update from v1 to v2 firmware using the creative drivers(thanks for the info guys!). It updated but now my player wont work with win XP. When plugged in now it shows me the message “USB Reading Data” and it will just stay like that indefinately. I think it worked just once before I uninstalled the creative drivers. I also tried installing the drivers again…no luck.

It works in Linux(Knoppix 5 live CD), although my SD card wont show up. I tried mounting it(the card) but don’t know enough about linux commands to know if I was doing it correctly(mount /media/sda2 ????). Now i’m using Knoppix to copy the music from my windows partition to the internal memory(you have to make the device writable, just right click on the desktop icon for the device to change read write modes)

So this is not a player problem but just my xp config skitzed it so I will format my PC and i’m confident it will work. I will actually try it on my school PC tommorow to be sure before I format.

Now I have a 4gb sd card (Samsung NAND 150x OEM) from ebay and it never worked. When I insert it I only get this message show up…permanently, or at least until I remove the card:

“External card
Checking changes in music content”

Please if anyone has a solution…otherwise i’m gonna resell the card on ebay and use 2gb sd’s instead. It’s a shame though, it did this with both firmware versions.

On another point regarding the in-ear earphones or any in-ear phones for that matter, i’m concerned theres a higher risk for infection considering they make contact with more gunk and push it further into the ear. And they really have to be pushed in to get some bass and so the sound is hurting my eardrums. Not very practical I think! Meanwhile i’m using my JVC clipons but i’ll get earbud style ones soon.

So yeh, I would realy be greatful if anyone can help my 4gb sd work with my e140. I mean its a fat32 player correct? and 4gb are using fat32? Maybe sandisk are locking out the cards on purpose? it wouldn’t suprise me.

Jeez it really is hard to find decent drag and drop expandable players these days eh? Man those Panasonic d-snap players looked sweet but you have to use software to load music onto the player. After going through the hassle with my sony Hi-MD and SonicStage I will avoid like the plague any craptasic device that will not support drag and drop.

I,ve got some problems with my e130, when I try to start it, the screen shows me a message
“Not enough memory, connect to PC and delete 4mb of music data”
Ive copy to my Sansa abaut 50 mb!
When I`m connect Sansa to PC, XP see it but I can`t delete, copy or erase.

I followed the flashing procedure from Xaero/Mike (#184) and Tibor (#168) using the SigmaTel driver in recovery mode then the SanDisk flash utility (2.0.0.01a). The flash utility gave me no errors. Now my e140 will not turn on on battery power. Connected to the USB I can read, write, and erase but once disconnected it goes dead. I already tried the battery reset procedure from Synic (#100).

The only way I can power up on battery is to hold the power button at the same time as I disconnect the unit from the USB but as soon as I release the power button it goes dead.

I just want to say for those with “dead” player after changing firmware that my player still works OK (with 2.x firmware) and that it’s time to change back to the previous 1.xxx firmware the same way as they did it with 2.xxx. This should work, but I haven’t tested it as my works OK. Never died.
Thanks and sorry for troubles but changing firmware is at your own risk, you all know it.
In case of problems, try to go back to 1.xxx firmware.
Tibor

SO has anyone that has a normally working, STOCK e-series sansa, meaning they haven’t fiddled with firmware and their computer isn’t messed up, and has bought a known good/working SD card (as proven by using it on another device rather than an unknown ebay purchase), been able to get it to work?

A prior poster had suggested FAT16, that is definitely wrong. FAT16 supports up to 2GB only, and that is a large part of why FAT32 exists at all, and why there is suspicion that the e-Series might support MORE than 2GB, because it does support FAT32. if only SigmaTel wasn’t so selfish by hiding their spec sheets we might have some real answers about what the ultimate ceiling is on the capabilities of this player.

I thought I had seen someone report theirs had worked with a 4GB card but it was on another forum, a forum where some of the kids are as troublesome/trollsome as possiblel so it could have been made-up fiction (ie- the poster hadn’t even tried it).

Okay, I got this MP3 player, (the 1 gig) and threw it away after 1 week. It is not as the above describes. It is a piece of unrealiable crap. So **** you all who like it. DON’T BUY IT> You are wasting your money.

QUOTE – The Reepr:
Okay, I got this MP3 player, (the 1 gig) and threw it away after 1 week. It is not as the above describes. It is a piece of unrealiable crap. So **** you all who like it. DON’T BUY IT> You are wasting your money.

With windows 2000 or XP, just open windows explorer and you will see two disk drives, one associated with internal player and the other with the player SD card if you have one. Just drag and drop the files (mp3 or wma files) from your computer hard disk to the player drive in explorer and this is it. It could not be as simple as that and it will work all the time without any problems.

With the Sansa e140 mp3 player, is it possible when you are listening to music on the main music screen, to go back to the specific folder you picked that song from and pick another song without going through all the sub menues again and scrolling down?. Example: If you go and pick a song from the Artist folder and you select it and it starts playing. Can you press a button to go back to the Artist folder and song highlighted instead of going back to menue and choose play music and artist folder and then scrolling all the way down where you were? thanks for your help!

>>> I bought an e140 the other day and did the update from v1 to v2 firmware using the creative drivers(thanks for the info guys!). It updated but now my player wont work with win XP. When plugged in now it shows me the message “USB Reading Data” and it will just stay like that indefinately. I think it worked just once before I uninstalled the creative drivers. I also tried installing the drivers again…no luck.

I have Blue 512MB Sandisk player.After reading the whol posts I tried with Creative Mass Storage driver and Sandisk update. It works and then afterwards I detached the player and inserted again. XP doesn’t it as mass storgae device,it pops upa HI-Speed USB HOST message.

One thing I notice in device manager is when the Player detected as Mass storage the “Player Recover Device Class” entry is no longer present in list instead “Storage Device” is there,which is perfectly OK. But when i re-inserted again,I never saw the “Storage device ” message,only the “Player Recover Device Class” entry always present( no yellow exclamation on it).

I got a SD Card from pql, and When I´m trying to write data into it using the e130, always appears a error of location of file (in windows), and into linux says I/O Error. Im wondering if anybody faces this problem before? My firmaware is 1.0.001e.

Its correct you should not update the firmware unless you are willing to go through the hassle reading the 250 posts on this page and having to possibly reinstall XP like I did (maybe even ruining your player!). Although the creative drivers allow you to install the new firmware they can also stop XP from recognising your Sansa(which happened after I uninstalled the creative drivers). It required an XP reinstall but now everythings working well 😉

still very happy with the player.

btw, isn’t anyone concerned about the hygene and danger of in-ear phones? They just push the wax further in the ear which shoudnt be happening to prevent infection, and i’m sure stale wax on the buds wouldnt be any good either. go clip ons! 😛

I’ve had an e130 for about two months & am loving it. About a month ago I bought a ‘cheap’ Kingston 2GB SD card & used just under 1GB of its space. Everything seemed to be working fine, but when I went to add some more MP3 files the other day I would get a message on Windows (XP) saying that: “Error Copying File or Folder” & “Cannot copy (name of file): the directory or file cannot be created”. I put the SD card from my camera in the e130 and the files transferred to it just fine. Has anybody else had problems with SD Cards not accepting their full capacity? Is it a fault with the card or the player?

I’ve had an Sansa e130 and try upgrade firmware from 1.xxx to 2.xxx. Now I have problem. Panel LCD on Sansa e130 flashing and I can’t turn ON. When I connect Sansa to USB port in computer, Windows XP found Sansa e140 … When I try upgrade now firmware, software can’t find Sansa mp3 player. Has anybody this problem ?

Hi , I have a problem with my sandisk e130 player.
The right earphone bud had stopped working.. actually it is producing sound but it is very low in comparision to other one … i think there is soem IC or something else which amplifies the sound .. ia anybody aware of it and can tell me how to correct the problem..
i would be thankful
thanks
Saurabh

Thanks so much for the hints on how to get the e140 going again. Mine died and I tried the no battery/power button hold 30 sec/plug into computer trick and it worked.

Also, about post # 280 (“Error Copying File or Folder” & “Cannot copy (name of file): the directory or file cannot be created”) – I have an embarrasingly old PC. After I loaded the songs to the e140 I found that the genres the songs had didn’t fit the grouping I wanted. So I put them in files folders and transferred them. When I later tried to transfer individual songs, if gave me that error message. So I transferred the whole folder.

Alternatively, you can change the genres by right-clicking and selecting properties (Windows)…as long as it isn’t licensed content.

i bought one of these a while ago, best thing i ever bought over the net, headphones are wicked, awesome memory beats the shit out of my old ipod, and it was cheap, i accidently ran it over with my quad my sister beat the crap out of it, and it looks mint, its a wicked player a must for any mp3 person on the go!

RE: #188-Bugs and Workarounds> Just got my e140 and gearing up for a weeklong trip. I too noticed that my albums were corrupted on the player. First I tried removing the track info. That worked for some of the albums. The next thing that I noticed dealt with ID3 versions and ordering on the Sansa. I had two songs with v1 tags while the rest in the album had v2 tags. Changing all to the same version seemed to put the songs in the correct order (note: I’ve named the titles “dd-tt – title” with dd refering to disk # and tt being track).

Here’s the last thing that I have figured out. Most of my albums are classical or opera, with all of them having 2-3 discs. Regardless of the number of discs or # of track that I copy to the player, I found some songs were always classified as an unknown album in the player. After looking at tags and such, I realized that there’s a limit for the number of characters in the title. With some operas, the title name includes the entire first line, which might be 100 or so characters. As a remedy, I shortened the titles of those songs not being catagorized together with the rest of the songs on the album. For 1 album, I fixed maybe 10 out of 50 songs. For another, I had to change 2.

RE: #251: Audible Books and External Cards> I too had a problem when I drag-and-drop *.aa files to the external card (that’s the only way to transfer TO THE EXTERNAL CARD). If you use Audible’s software to make the transfer to the internal memory, Audible places a *.sys file, which I presume is the license. When that is on the player, any external card containing *.aa files can be played. I haven’t tried deleting the books from the internal memory and leaving the *.sys file, but I’ve noticed that that file doesn’t seem to change regardless of how many books I upload to the player

I’ve had the same problem as other posters with my SD card. I have a 1GB PQI that refuses to accept uploads from the player. I went out and bought a cardreader to format the card to FAT32, but I still get the same I/O error when transferring. My remedy is to copy the songs using a reader/writer. Don’t know if this is Sansa’s problem or an IRQ problem on my computer, but since I had 3 days before leaving, I didn’t have time to investigate further. I’ll try a Sandisk 1GB card later….

okay, what is up with these e130’s i’ve tried everything to try and fix it, i turned mine on one day and just a blue screen came up no words or sound. I emailed them to see if that would help, but no it didnt do a thing. I’ve tried every technique thats been posted here but nothing will work! I think im gunna call sandisk technical support and see what they can do, maybe they’ll give me a new one.

Has anyone else noticed that the Equalizer does not function properly when SRS WOW is on. (Compare the difference in operation of the equalizer with and without SRS WOW on.) With SRS WOW on, increasing the volume of a single band, for example the 62Hz band, increases the volume right across the entire spectrum instead of just the bass frequencies (which is what correctly happens with SRS WOW off).

On a related subject, it appears that the Focus element of SRS WOW is designed predominantly with speakers in mind. Its purpose appears to be to “virtually” raise the apparent height of poorly positioned speakers (http://www.srslabs.com/ae-theoryofoperation8282.asp). From experience, setting Focus to “Low” is the same as turning it off (try setting it to Low and putting both TruBass and SRS 3D to zero, switch SRS WOW on and off and it now has no effect). It seems a little odd that Focus would be included in a product destined for a predominantly earbud product. Using earbuds, Focus (set to anything but Low) makes the music sound too close and tinny for me.

Also, I find that the TruBass psychoacoustic effect does not effectively trick my brain into hearing improved fundamental bass tones. Rather it appears to muddy the lower mid-tone ranges. Again, this function seems more applicable to using speakers (especially in the absence of a subwoofer) rather than earbuds. With earbuds it is possible to fairly cheaply purchase snugly-fitting, air-tight products which can deliver true bass without the need for TruBass!

This leaves me pondering a question. In the Sansa e130’s SRS 3D, did they remember to implement the set of HRTF (Head Related Transfer Function) curves which SRS Labs specifically say are “utilized for headphones” – or are they, by default, the ones for speakers. Presumably there should be a menu option to be able to switch between headphones and speakers (as there is in Windows Media Player’s implementation of SRS).

My e130 also has a compatibility problem with a memory card (a 1 GB Twinmos). Furthermore my Sansa does not read a card formatted to FAT32 but reads it when it is formatted to FAT. Interestingly the internal memory is in FAT32 format. What is the rationale behind it??

That might explain the 2GB limit for the SD card, which is the maximum size of a FAT16 partition.
Somebody should try a 4GB SD card, put it into a card reader and make 2 or 3 partitions, each of them less than 2GB.

Hi, I have almost killed it today by means of removing it from USB during copying. Thanks above mentioned notes regarding reformatting (Mike message 184). XP driver for sigmatel was taken from IRiver (they provided drivers, not like SanDisk. It’s strange that SanDisk did not issue any recovery utilities for cases like this.

Somebody should do it the normal way first, not fiddling around with firmware, not using some ill-gotten questionable ebay card and not partitioning the card.

The test is simple- Take an unmolested Sansa, an unmolested FAT32 formatted card, and try it.
The player DOES SUPPORT FAT32.

There seem to be a number of posts where people are potentially doing something wrong then claiming the player doesn’t work right. If you don’t bother to specify EXACT SCENARIO, including every detail such as how you formatted the card, your information is useless or even worst, suggested something that is misleading.

For example, I have a PQI 2GB card like another poster and it works fine formatted to FAT32. I regularly use it and a PNY 1GB card, which has also been FAT16 on occasion but currently FAT32. When I first got the player I had only a spare 256MB card and had used it formatted to FAT32 also. No problems at all.

The issue is not one of FAT32, whatever problem #295 has is an anomoly, plenty of people use FA32.

I have the same issue as Rubens post#258. Every time I turn on my e140 it requests which language to proceed, then states there is not enough memory, plug the device in your pc. My computer recognizes 2 removable disk when I plug in my e140, however I cannot access them.

I do not know what my “anomaly” is, but I state that the card came as formatted to FAT 32 and my player did not recognize it (firmware is 2.0.001e). Then I reformatted it to FAT32, again it did not recognize. At last when I formatted it to FAT the player saw the content of the card. If you know a better way of making an eBay shit card compatible with this please let me know, because this player seems to regret cards formatted to FAT32 (as my previous SanDisk branded 512 MB card).

After using my Sansa e140 for 1,5 month a big problem occured. The player does not respond when I connect it to my computer. It does not activate. And my computer does not ‘see’ it as a new disc. I’ve chcecked it on many computers – every time situation is the same. Any advice?

#305, aka SerVacY, Try it on another system, if it still isn’t recognized then inspect the USB contacts in the Sansa. If the jack has play in it you might try holding the cable at slightly different angles or the worse would be if it has been stressed onto pulling off the PCB. Also remove the battery and retry it.

THANK YOU for the feedback #304/AnnoyedOne, it is good to have confirmation of a 4GB card working. That happens to be the 4GB version of one 2GB card I’ve been using w/FAT32, among others which I formatted to FAT32 /bootable as I rotated them around in an embedded system and a camera. They were formatted with HP’s tool, “SP27608.EXE” (version 2.1.8). Formerly I was using an older version too, “SP27213.exe”, (v2.0.6)

I think the reason for the random playback always being in the same order, is the way sansa e100-series works, by creating playlists.

That is why it is so slow to start everytime you have made changes. It is creating a playlist of all the songs I guess. And it also creates a random playlist, wich it will be using when playing random. This playlist will not be changed until you put new songs on it, and therefor the songs will play in the same order everytime.

That is just really poor design from Sandisk. Other mp3 players I have tried are ready to play in 1 (ONE) seccond, regardles of changes.

It seems ridiculous that you have to wait atleast 7 secconds, and then maybe even half a minute if you made changes.

Also what’s the deal with the workaround needed to upgrade to firmware 2.x?

I thought this was a nice player, with SD slot!!! And I payed just 40 bucks.

I have bought the sansa e130 and I wanted to upgrade it buying an SD card of 2GBs.
My question is, am I going to have a problem with my player if I buy a non Sandisk card? And what about read/write speed of the card? Does it have to be the “standard” edition or a 133X or 160X speed will work too?

Just put the new firmware on my E140. Went from 1.0.006 to 2.0.001. Clearly starts up faster. It no longer re-indexes the tracks which are stored on the player and indexes only changes to the tracks stored on the 2GB Corsair 133x SD card I’m using. Still too early to tell if it will improve battery life which has been miserable (

#312, Moonwalker, what do you mean? I don’t know anybody that buys Sandisk memory, it’s ridiculously overpriced. What does “the standard” mean? All SD cards are supposed “standardized”, that’s the point of their being called “SD” cards. It doesn’t come with a SD card, we’re all buying one at random.

The three I use most often are a generic brand ATP 256MB, PNY 1GB, and pqi 2GB 150X. You dont’ need any particlar speed rating to play back MP3 (which has lower bitrate than even the un-rated cheap old cards) but the slower your card the longer it’ll take to transfer to it from a PC over the Sansa cable or via card reader, etc.

#314, Don, You are right. I had a standard 512MB SD card, but the download throughout the Sansa was slow: about 600 KByte/sec. Now I’ve purchased an A-DATA 2GB 60x SD card, hoping it will be faster, but I’m disappointed: the download speed hasn’t changed: it remains 600 KByte/sec. The internal memory is faster, it’s about 3000 Kbyte/sec. I have to use a separate memory card reader/writer in order to fill the 2 GB SD card within reasonable time.

you no where i can get 1 i live in south auckland New zealand wen i was listing to my music i had it in my pocket inside the case that came with it and the screen broke so i took it out and i need a new screen but i dont no where to get 1 got any ideas plese help

The volumer/navigation button is crap. Hard to turn and your fingers slip on it. And it reacts to slowly to it, making it completely useless for navigation. Luckily you can use the buttons on the front instead for that. But for the volume you are forced to use it, and it really sucks.

Sound quality is fine to me, and volume is plenty loud. I heard people complaining about volume not being very loud, but this must be the same people I see on the bus, playing so loud that everybody in the bus, and probably on the sidewalk too, can hear their music.

I managed to also update from firmware 1.x to 2.x, using the methods described here.

Some anoyances, but it’s a kinda ok player anyways, and since I payed just 50 USD for it, it’s not a big deal.

I still state that Sansa e130 does not support Twinmos Ultra 133x, because I own one and my Sansa insists on not writing on it, whereas I can easily transfer files into it thru a made-in-china cardreader–with no error.

@Infotewl: I’m telling the truth and don’t know why you are so strict about that SD card thing.

Ercan, my point was that it’s possible SOME people are jumping to conclusions. I don’t have a Twinmos Ultra 133X, but again as I mentioned recently, the brand/model of card is NOT the only issue! SD IS supposed to be a standardized technology, you can’t just declare a card bad and have us accept it if you don’t specify the exact scenario. A card can be completely standard and workable then a manufacturer (or camera, user, etc) formats it such that it doesn’t have a compatible partitioning or formatting anymore.

I also managed to take one card I have and do something to it such that it wouldn’t work on my Sansa, it had a lot of non-music files on it from another use. I don’t recall the exact scenario anymore but once I’d merely deleted all those extraneous files, it worked fine and continues to do so.

After using my Sansa c150 for 6 weeks, a big problem occured. The player does not respond when I connect it to my computer. It does not activate. And my computer does not ’see’ it as a new disc. I’ve checked it on another computer – every time situation is the same. Any advice? The logo is frozen into position & I cannot get past the first logo….

They have no “offer/upgrade” option AFAIK, but more to the point, what do you want to gain?

It’s not necessarily an upgrade! While they claim “user replacable battery”, it’s a special Li-Ion cell that will be expensive if you can get one at all, so in about 3 years your player is not worth much, while with the e100 series you can get a AAA anywhere for about $1.

e100 also accepts full SD card, and we now have confirmation it supports over 2GB, 4GB reported working and good odds that the newest 8GB would work, possibly even as high as SD will ever go later. mini/microSD can never have as high a capacity because of the space limitation so even today, you cannot achieve as high a capacity with c200 as with e130. c200’s case looks nicer though, there is something to be said for that so long as it ends up being sturdy (which we can’t assume, consider a certain iPods problems in design).

Lithium ion batteries mean that it will get recharged via USB, right? And also are you aware of how many charge cycles it will last…I read somewhere that Ipod nano ones last upto 300-500 cycles and a new one costs about $20.

And about the 8GB card..not sure if it will work. I don’t know why Sansa says “upto 2GB”. Although people have tried 4GB..I think I will mail Sansa support and reconfirm this before I actually do buy a card.

BTW: do you know any good brands having 8GB card, share some links…I want to know their cost.

We can’t know what the remaining possible runtime will be on a different battery, but I’m not too keen on the possible failure mode of Li-Ion either. Nano batteries can be expected more available due to the larger user base, but even then, $20 plus shipping is more than 1/2 the price I paid for my e130.

Of course we can’t be sure it’ll work but it does seem likely. Sansa probably claimed up to 2GB merely because they did what some other memory products do, only guarantee against what is currently in the market for testing purposes.

Why would you bother mailing sansa? You are not going to get a reply from the engineers who made it, you will only get a entry level CSR that reads a spec off the spec sheet. if that spec sheet said it uses only 2GB cards, that’s what you will get in your reply regardless of the true limit.

As for “good brands”, yes, randomly buy any brand you recognize. To get 8GB in SD sized format it’ll have to be using the newest high density memory chips and as for the controller, that’ll obviously support 8GB too, but it’s speed won’t matter, not for playing MP3/etc.

Just do a search, the 8GB crds are just now entering the market but you can find them yourself, and if you wait awhile, finding them cheaper as anything newest/largest will carry a price premium as the 4GB cards did also, but those 4GB are now under $60 after rebates or promos… it just takes some time.

“The higher capacity SD cards are called SD HC cards ( Sandisk has a 4 GB SD HC card now, I believer it’s due to partitioning problem we cannot support anything more that 2 GB at this point. Might be able to if a future firmware upgrade is available). We currently don’t have 8 GB SD card.”
——————————————————————

So I guess, in the future Sandisk might support higher capacity cards. Dunno, what is the partitioning problem mentioned above…

BTW: AnnoyedOne/infotewl… Will a 4GB card directly start working with my 1.x version e140 player? If not, what would be the steps I need to follow to get it working.

It’s a pity the Sandisk reply didn’t mention specifics like exactly what was meant by “partitioning problem”.

I suspect Sandisk has attempted to segregate their own SD cards in an attempt to dumb-down consumer buying choices, that they call one “HC” for high capacity merely because it requires FAT32 formatting to overcome /one/ partitioning problem as related to filesystem support. Since we know Sansa can use FAT32, what we really need is someone with a handfull of different > 2GB cards, enough tools and known-how to isolate where/what problems might occur if they do, and of course a Sansa e-series.

My player is 1.x also, and supports FAT32. I don’t have a 4GB card for trial though, but see no reason why > 2GB would not be supported. Essentially, > 2GB support is the whole point behind having FAT32 support, as otherwise FAT16 is faster (which doesn’t matter for MP3 playback, but to other devices it does).

Based on what I’ve been able to find, there are two 4gb cards which are known to work with an E130/140, the PQI 150x and the A-Data 150x Turbo. Based on this info I bought an A-Data 150x Turbo card. I tried it for the first time today.

Although my E140 firmware upgraded from v1 to v2 correctly recognized the FAT32 formatted card, and wrote files to it (3.9+gb of music), the player would only index and play 501 of the 955 songs on the card. I was trying to go back to v1 firmware, but ended up reflashing v2. Put the 4gb card back into the player and started it up and presto, all 955 songs. Successfully loaded 286 songs into the internal memory and presto the player saw 1241 songs. It’s a 5gb player!

I don’t keep track of the write speeds of the cards I have. I copy almost everything I have onto the cards from a desktop computer over a wireless network through a laptop to my MP3 players, so write speed isn’t something I am particularly concerned about.

I seldom write directly to the Sansa though, it’s less fiddly to just pop the card into an already-PC-attached reader than plugging cables. I have a 512MB Sansa and larger cards though, so I’m not as concerned about it’s internal memory.

I recently bought one of these Sansa players, and was planning to upgrade it with a Secure Digital card. The Sandisk website says the max is 2GB, but do you know if it’ll work with 4GB? Or maybe even 8GB? That would be pretty cool.
Thanks!

It seems nobody has yet answered #267 from csw. Has anyone found a good way to sync to the player using WMP (or other automated sync tools) and avoid having duplicate songs show up on the internal and external storage?

My workaround has been to create two auto-playlists in WMP that are mutually exclusive. I use the song length variable to accomplish this. Songs under 180 seconds in one list and over 180 in the other. Then I associate one playlist to the external memory device and the other to the internal memory device. But this isn’t such a great solution.

The other solution I’ve seen here is to just use the file system/explorer to drag and drop. I don’t really like that because I like to just replace a percentage of the total music when I sync, on both the external and internal, randomly, and not have duplicates across the two “devices”.

I’m wondering if anyone else has solved. Perhaps found a way to group the two deveices together into one logical device? Or used a good software solution for synchronizing that looks across the internal and external memory.

My previous player was a Rio Cali, which also used external memory, and the software they provided for synchronizing did just this. It spanned the internal and external storage, removed a user-specified percentage of songs, and replaced that percentage with new music and no duplicates.

I just got my 4gb card to work. I have an e130 firmware v.1 and the card brand is ridata 150x. I didn’t work at first then I formatted the card with XP. Just the FAT32 quick format. Then I added music via WMP sync mode. Everything seems to be working just fine.

Has anyone suggested simply editing the file’s “Year” ID tag (using a free Tag editor you can amend multiple files at once). By giving them a fake year (i.e 2010) you can effectively aggregate your fav tracks into separate playlists using the “play by year” mode. Only prob is if you wanna keep the original year tag but then you can leave the file on your PC alone and only edit the one on yor sandisk.

I think buying a fast card like 150X or similar and not a regular one would probably be better:

1- Player will probably starts faster cause sometimes has to scan the files on the disk for mp3 tags (i guess that users that reported these problems of slow speed with external SD card is related to a slow one???)…

2- A fast card will allow to copy faster the files from your PC? Maybe a difference could be seen when copy to the sansa, but it could be seen when copied from a PC to a fast memory card reader???

1 – If you had a very slow card, it “might” take longer, but we see from transfers from the Sansa to a computer, that it cannot exploit the full 150X speed of a card (grab a random USB2.0 reader and it will read faster). Now consider the Sansa also has to do a little processing of the info it’s reading, and you probably won’t get any significant speedup going above 60X card, if even 60X helps. Most likely the slowdown realiting to having an external card installed is due to having more songs to catalog. You could test this by comparing same number of songs (but smaller ones) only on the internal memory, versus that number of larger files on the external memory instead. It is likely the speed depends on the memory controller embedded in the Sansa in either case, but in theory they could optimize it for lower latency accessing the memory on the Sansa board- but I doubt it is that sophisticated.

2 – Yes a fast card will allow copying to or from a PC faster but only up to the limit of what the Sansa’s memory controller can do and as mentioned above, it is slower than possible with a USB2 card reader. Since SD cards inhernantly write slower than reading, the faster SD card would tend to improve writes to Sansa long before reads from it.

I would tend to buy a faster SD card for another reason though, that the beauty of having a removable card is not only being able to use it in a card reader, but being able to use it for something else besides the Sansa. Suppose your Sansa breaks some day or you bought a 2GB card and later decide to try a 4 or 8GB card and the 2GB card ends up being used for some other purpose than the Sansa, a purpose that can exploit the faster reads more. 150X cards with highest read speeds are now common and cheap so that makes a lot of sense.

Hi there…
anyone else have a problem with the top half of the LCD not showing?
I have a Sansa E130 512MB about 9 months old and the screen is playing up.
The whole screen “backlights” but no text visible in the top half – which makes reading menu options tricky to say the least.
What are my options here?

Geoff, I don’t recall the warranty period but if still under warranty, take advantage of that.

If not under warranty, use a strong light on the display to inspect it, confirm no overt physical damage. If none, it’s probably the contacts inside, you’d have to carefully disassemble it and examine, possibly clean those contacts.

I took my Sansa apart once, it’s fiddly to do it because you have to flex the frame to get the parts out, and the hold and menu buttons wedge in when reassembing. I wish I’d taken pictures while apart but didn’t.

I have an e140 that seems to take forever to startup. 12 seconds with the internal 1GB memory full up, 34 seconds with a cheapie 1GB PNY SD card full and loaded and 43 seconds with a 2GB A-Data 150x SD card. It took over 100 seconds to startup when the 2GB SD card is first put in but thankfully it goes down to the 43 on restarts.

So I did the upgrade from 1.0.010 to 2.0.001E that has been provided here, hoping that I would get some benefit to startup times. The upgrade ran without a single hitch, thanks Tibor 149 and Bob 168!! However, there really isn’t any noticable difference in startup. Everything seems very much as it was before going to 2.0.001.

43 seconds to turn on my 3GB music player? That does suck. And with the fact that it always goes back to the start of the track, I can’t help but dream about getting an e280 to replace this! But then again, I do still like my e140 afterall. I’ll just have to wait till it breaks…

On my e130, there is a significant difference in startup time between a “cheap” Sandisk SD card and a fast 150x Corsair SD card. I presume that the startup time is dependent upon the e130 reading the “database” and the SD card directory and determining if a re-databasing is required.

remove the battery
keep holding the menu button and plug in the usb
it will tell you it found a stmp3500, want to install the hardware
now
copy and paste the follwong text into a text document and save it as
stmp3rec.inf
then browse to that file
it will find it, install it then when it says there is a problem continuing run the sansa2 update
and voila, the little jerk works
so here is the file
copy all from between the lines
——-

I have the SanDisk Sansa e280, and I love it, it’s great!
But I’m having a few problems with it and I was hoping someone could help me, ’cause I’m not very good when it comes to technology.

#1) After I put my songs on it and unplugged it, I erased everything, but when I plugged it back in a few weeks later it erased all of the songs on it, is this normal or is there something wrong with my player.

#2) I have a few videos on it and they worked fine, but now they’re all erased and I haven’t even plugged it into my computer.
What happened?

Hello All,
I have a sansa sandisk m250. I know it’s made for PC/windows, but I bought an Apple computer earlier this year and have been using them together just fine. I plug in the USB and simply drag and drop files from my computer into the Sandisk. However, I was trying to start over by dragging all the music files to the trash and emptying the trash, so that I could put new music files on. However something happened, things started freezing during the process and I think I ended up unplugging the player before I dragged its icon to the trash (a must for ejecting things from Apples). Now I have an error message that says “Not enough space for music DB. Please free 4 MB.” It shows there are 0 files on my player. And I now cannot gain access to the menu. Anytime I press the menu button it goes back to the error message. Thus, it’s perfectly useless because I can’t even listen to the radio.

Has anyone used these players successfully with Apple computers? Anyone have any idea how to fix this?

First, I’m not convinced that the Sansa is designed for PC/Windows. I’ve used the m250 under Linux and under Mac OS X, but never with Windows.

If you unplug the device while copying, you’ll have some problems, but they seem best fixable on the Mac.

Yes, you can plug this into a Mac and use the Disk Utility to Verify the disk volume. It can eliminate miscellaneous problems like empty clusters, erroneous EOFs (end of file markers), incorrect space calculations, and kill off corrupt files.

If the Verify Disk option shows an error, then you may want to open the USB device in the Mac Finder and save a copy of your files into a Mac folder on your desktop before proceeding with any repairs.

Repair Disk will make permanent changes while saving all the good files. Any corrupt files will be echoed to the Disk Utility console. These get turned into zero-btye files that you’ll want to remove from the Sansa before reloading.

Mondo, it has nothing to do with subjective belief. Sansa is designed to work with Windows, and it is Sandisk’s target market because (for better or worse) Windows dominates personal computer OS. It operates as a UMS device compatible with any OS that supports UMS, and of course the quite common FAT/FAT32 filesystem.

Unplugging a device on Windows is no different, you then need to scan the volume to check for inconsistencies between the table and files themselves- remember is it not an OS control, it’s the OS checking the filesystem. At most (in windows or another OS) you might format the partition.

Infotewel,
I was just trying to point out that the Sansa is architecture-neutral. Any system that supports the USB interface and the FAT filesystem support ought to be able to deal with the Sansa effectively, hence it’s not Windows dependent.

My e130 makes me nuts! No matter what i do it always says “unknown album”. If I have more than 1 album loaded it plays track 1 from each album, then track 2 from each album. Really bothering me. Can someone help?

Have you checked to see if your album mp3 files are id tagged properly since the e130 navigates by the mp3 tags? The file properties for each mp3 file normally shows any id tags in WinXP. Otherwise, you can use a tagging program.

my E140 keeps getting an I/O device error. i cant seem to do anything with it. it will only let me go to the language screen. tells me that i need to delete 4 mbs and powers down. i get that error when i try to access the drive. help. please

Capt_Howdy – I have the same problem with my e-130. It shows the same message error and just powers down. Windows XP shows an error when I try to enter the disc while sansa is connected. Anyone has any idea how to cope with the problem? Please write me at gryzli5@wp.pl .

sorry.. i have tried all of the things mentioned here.
SanDisks support is useless. they keep repeating the same thing over and over. and when you tell them it doesnt work they dont listen and repeat the same thing.
nothing seems to work and it looks like im not the only guy with the same problem.

Well were we supposed to guess? You didn’t even fully detail what you mean with “i get that error when i try to access the drive”.

If nothing works, including pulling battery and connecting to USB to clear off files, try scanning the logical volume for errors and/or formatting it. You might also try an OS without all that junk WinXP wants to do “for” you without asking.

This is most often caused by filling your player with songs so full that there is no free space left to build the index. Don’t do that, and try to get the player to have more free space IF that is the actual cause of what you’re seeing.

it will not let me access anything at all. read 370. .and another guy 373. same thing. it will not recognize the drive. if it cant recognize it, it cant format it. and there was only about 20 songs put on the disk in the first place.

I agree. System detects two connected discs, but when you try to access any, you see the message telling that you have to put in a disc before (the same message can be seen by trying to enter cd drive when there’s no cd inside). The problem started to occur after I had transfered many mp3s to my player and disconnected it from usb. No possibility of formating etc., then.

If you have no SD card in it (remove it if you did), AND you didn’t do something unusual like partition the Sansa to have two logical volumes, I’d take it and connect to another computer with different OS, or at least check on it in XP’s Disk Management, but neither of you are following directions such as trying to partition or format it, and reporting back what happens then.

this thing is toast. i have tried everything and have tried it on 3 different computers and 2 different OS’.
finally the pylons at Sandisk are getting me a replacement. those idiot kept telling me to go to teh menu and do blah blah blah. in the very first communication i clearly stated that i cannot access any menus. just loads the language menu and then shuts down. 4 different people too!.. bad customer support i say. any CSR knows that they should pay attention to what the customer says.

I just got an E-140… love it, so far, but have a question. I’ve attempted to load an mp3 book I have stored on an SD card. The card is formatted FAT32. There are 208 files, and I have them stored in a sub-directory. The MP3 tags are correctly entered, with the tiles being named “001 – Book” through “208 – Book” and the tracks numbered 1 through 208. The “Artist” and “Album” fields are correct entered as well as the “Genre”. My question is, why does the play order come up with track 100 following track 009? The listing runs 1-10, 100-208 (with 11-29 interspersed at random), then 30-99. This really floors me, since my son’s Ilo 1gb reads the card with the correct play order! The firmware version is: 2.0.001 A, and there is nothing stored on the internal storage space except the advertising that came with the unit. Any idea?

i just got a SanDisk Sansa 1.0 gb or w/e .. like 2 days ago .. and i`m pissed cauz already it stopped working. its not a battery problem either..its just when i hold the power button down .. it turns on but it freezes at the welcome screen. help pleaseee!!!!! ='[

capt_howdy..im facing the same problem everytime i try to on the e130 what comes out on the screen is please sonnect to pc and delete 4mb of ur songs..when i try to access it..I/0 error will appear!!!if theres anybody who can offer a solution it will be deeply appreciated

Losing formatting is usually due to improperly disconnecting the I/O device it’s in during I/O operations. I mean your card might be bad but more commonly it’s that you aren’t waiting till writes to it are done before disconnecting it.

Anyway, these support 4GB cards and Transcent isn’t particularly cheapie, it’s just yet another branding label stuck onto an industry standard card. If you want to know what card it really is you have to look at the greenish ink stamp on the back, look that up.

I have that I/O error thing too. so is there nothing u can do??? I’ve tried everything. Different computers, different drives, changing batteries everything. So its toast there is nothing I can do to fix it????

Hey Chad and Amanda. there is nothing that can be done. call them. if you still have it under warrenty, have them replace it. i wish there was something else but those pyllons at sandisk dont give you much choice.

Thanks for the tip Capt_Howdy, i got it as a gradutaion gift though so I may have to talk to the people who got it for me an see if they still have the receipt. What a piece of shit, it really chews the battery power too (well it did before it died). Thanks again.

Capt_Howdy, I don’t think name calling (Pyllons) is going to help and you are a bit misled if you thought other company’s CSRs would be able to do any better. That doesn’t make Sandisk any better for not being able to help, but you might as well point the finger at everyone as you’re not going to talk to an engineer through a call or email in most cases unless you are a very large customer with some clout.

I duplicated the problem you had where it says it needs more memory and shuts off. All I had to do was delete the non-audio files SETTINGS.DAT, MUSIC.SEC, and MUSIC.LIB off the player then fill it so full of files that the player had no room to recreate them. I would expect a similar result if you left the files on and filled player so full it couldn’t make a new copy.

Anyway, like yours the player was unusable till I hooked it up to a PC and did as it suggested, deleting files to make the free space. It seems at this point your PC gives an IO error while mine does not. I would suggest you look at your PC configuration trying to determine what is different about it’s removable drive access. Do you have some kind of OS or software that has the annoying habit of wanting to mark players for DRM (or other) purposes? I could see that being a problem if the player had insufficient free space too.

I recommend you try to access the Sansa on another system, hopefully one running different OS and free from other potentially invasive software. If you have another USB cable I’d try that too, some of the very thin, clear sheathed, and especially the ones with LEDs that light up can be problematic. Similarly so with ports connected by dongles, it would be best to connect to the rear motherboard USB ports if at all possible just to rule out this potential for problems.

I can’t help wondering why I had to type all this instead of those of you having a problem, fully describing what you’d done in an attempt to rectify it. It’s almost as though you don’t care if it works and only want to complain. Plenty of people use a Sansa fine and like it, don’t consider it “a piece of shit” at all.

Amanda, if you have SRS Wow turned on that will consume significantly more power and thus lower battery life. I get over 6 hours without SRS from a generic $1 NiMH AA and find that sufficient, especially since the other alternatives these days are a costly lithium cell that will need relaced at a cost of $25 (total) or more within 3 years if you want longest runtime as you seem to imply you would.

if you read my previous posts i did try it on a few different systems. i even tried it on a fresh set up of XP. no non-essential software installed on the system. i even tried using 3 different cables.

“I can’t help wondering why I had to type all this instead of those of you having a problem, fully describing what you’d done in an attempt to rectify it. It’s almost as though you don’t care if it works and only want to complain.”

I did try. and try. and try and try. but you didnt bother to read that. just complain.

Next time, read before you judge.

Also, i call those guys pylons as they kept repeating the same crap even though i had told them time and time again that it does not work. they kept telling me to turn on the system and go to settings and all this other crap but NEVER listened when i said it would NOT stay on and it shut itself down after getting that message.

I was a CSR. you listen to what your customers are saying. These pylons don’t.

It may be shutting down after getting that message, but I reproduced that situation and recovered from it by merely deleting files to make the free space as the message instructed. In other words, that is what it’s supposed to do, it is still working properly as designed in that situation. Perhaps with some forethought they could have created an extra dummy file to usurp more free space to prevent running out of space but they didn’t.

If you wanted to call that a defective design, that is a subjective decision since it can be avoided by knowing about it.

The remaining issue is why there is an IO error when trying to connect to a system and access it. Only with enough details can we know what differs between an attempt(s) that fail, and another which did not, since it seems fairly clear that something is different.

IF that something is that your player is damaged, only RMA to Sandisk will help. If that something is not the Sansa, be aware that if you do the same thing that resulted in this situation, again with the replacement player, you may find the same problem reoccuring. Therefore I would advise leaving at least 4MB of free space unless you know your system can access the Sansa and make that space available later as mine can.

If I push for details it is in everyone’s best interests, to know what is causing your problem and to avoid doing that. By “your problem” it could mean the Sansa is damaged or defective, not user error, but we haven’t determined that yet.

Yes it’s fixable, I already did it once. I also already mentioned that it is important to supply details of what you ARE doing, exactly, all of the details at once, comprehensively. It is not subject to opinion, the variable is in what those who can’t do it, are doing differently than those that can. Since you and Capt_Howdy choose not to do that, it’s going to interfere with fixing it. I wish there were a really polite way of saying it but that is the bottom line.

Hey i said I was computer illeterate, so i havent done anything cept try it on diff comps. LIKE I SAID all i have done is change the batteries then sometimes it wont turn on at all and other times it’ll come into the language selection screen so i hit english then it says not enough memory please connect to pc and delete 4 mb of memory(or songs cant member) and when i connected to my comp (i tried diff comps and drives too) it said cannot open device due to I/O error. and i cant right click on it or anything. so thats all i’ve done. so if it is fixable please explain clearly wat i should do cos i have no idea with computers. thank u

I bought one today, and when i put my first song on and turned it on, i got the message “internal Searching for new music” and it just stays there, doesn’t move. i deleted all te songs off it, but it still shows that message, have I got a dud, btw one of the music file doesn’t seem to delete off, just keep reapearing, could this be the preoblem? is there anyway to reset the whole thing back to normal?

Everyboy, i have found out how to reset your mp3 player, right click the player in “My Computer” go down to format, then tick “quick format” then click start, work for me, this is for e140 don’t know about others

I enjoyed reading the reviews in this thread and saw people asking what are the best sound settings for this player. I guess it all has to do with preferences in taste. I mostly listen to Dance,House,Techno some hiphop and rock. And here is the settings I am using on all those styles.

The two things that isn’t well documented and i want to clarify here are:

1. It supports lyrics BUT they can’t be embed within ID3 TAG and they must have “.LRC” extension (not TXT).
It also have find a little bug if you interrupt the lyrics showing inplaying (for example opening a menu) it doesnt resume.

I have had an e140 for about a year now and I am pretty happy with it as a music player but it really sucks for audio books or podcasts in mp3 format. It does not have bookmarks for these file types, but what is worse is that that it does not restart from where it left off in the middle of a large file if the device is powered down.

I notice that the m series (m240, m250) are now being offered very cheaply – I guess that they are about to be discontinued. It occurred to me to buy one of these just for audio books and keep my e140 for music.

So here is my question, does the m-series behave the same way as the e-series as far as restarting mp3 files after power down?

With regard to bugs in tags of WMA files: I found that sometimes tracks of an album would not list in the correct order, or sometimes other strangeness. It seems that the e130 is very particular in how information is listed in the tag. There are two potential problems: 1) the track number must be tagged as a “DWORD”, and not a string. WMP tags as a DWORD, but some other software, including tag editors, do not. 2) if the Year tag comes before the Tracknumber tag, it causes problems.

I haven’t yet developed efficient fixes to deal with these problems. What I have been doing is using the tag editor included in the DBPoweramp software. For each track which is messed up, this is my workflow:

First, make sure DBPoweramp will write the track as a DWORD.
Under DBPoweramp configuration/codecs, click on Advanced Options, scroll down to Windows Media Audio ID Tagging, and set WM/TrackNumber to “as DWORD”.

Next, change the order of the tags
1: remove the track number tag
2: add the track number tag again
3: remove the Year tag
4: add the Year tag again

In WinXP, I fixed the “Not enough space for Music DB” error on my e260 by putting it in MSC mode and running Check Disk (Scandisk) with both options selected. I assume defragment worked for Anonymous because it runs Check Disk first. It found almost 500K of file errors and placed them in a FOUND.000 directory which can be safely deleted.

Is anyone else having trouble with Audible files? My e130 has a really hard time keeping track of my place. When I hold down the rewind or fast-forward buttons, it skips around, making it really hard to find where I want to be. (Yesterday I supposedly went about 20 seconds back but ended up starting in the same place I was before.) It also doesn’t restart in the same place I stop at if I press pause. Instead, I have to power the unit down while it’s playing, and then it usually starts again within a few seconds of where it was before. (This is particularly annoying when I just want to pause it for a minute or two when I get a phone call or something.)

I’ve been back and forth with Sandisk technical support on these issues. Someone supposedly tested one on their end, and wasn’t able to duplicate the problem, so they sent me a new one. It has the same problems, plus a couple of new ones. Now it sometimes restarts at the beginning of a book after I’ve turned it off while it was playing, or starts a different book from the beginning. It also sometimes will resume a book for a couple of seconds and then switch over to another book or an MP3 file.

I’ve very frustrated. I’ve put up with this thing for about a year now and I’m about ready to give up. I really liked my Rio 100 with its 32MB of memory (that lasted many years until it started having problems) that this was the replacement for. I wish this worked as well.

Marcella, I went to the website with my prob (the I/O error which is very common so it seems) and there was someone there with the same problem, and they also tried right clicking and it didnt work, so does anyone know of any other silutions? please im desperate!

I,ve got some problems with my e130, when I try to start it, the screen shows me a message
“Not enough memory, connect to PC and delete 4mb of music data”. When I`m connect Sansa to PC, XP see like unit disk, but I can`t see files display “error I/O” when I try connect.

What is the difference betwen the E and the A firmware
I had 1.00.10A and upgrade to 2.0.001A with the help of the steps on the recovery mode here..
Worked great.
I suppose if I had 1.0.010E I could have upgraded to 2.0.001E, but not sure of the benefit of that..
DOES anyone know the diff?

Amanda (if you are still reading) and others having problems with the i/o error — here’s something for you to try:

1. REMOVE BATTERY
2. HOLD IN POWER BUTTON FOR 60 seconds to discharge the internal capacitor.
3. INSERT BATTERY and power on.

If it powers on ok, then shut it back off and try connecting it to your computer.

IMPORTANT: Whenever you are thru downloading songs to the player (or for that matter using any USB device) I strongly recommend that you use the USB eject icon in the system tray before unplugging the device. DON’T JUST PULL THE PLUG.

Careful now, if you ask for details you are implying they are supposed to have put forth at least enough effort that they have a reasonable expectation they could solve the problem. Any further suggestion would require more effort than they seem willing to make.

In other words, I’m let to believe there are multiple trolls on this topic by iPod affiliated viral marketers. Sad but true, iPod sure as heck didn’t get where it is by having a superior product.

I have 2GB SD memory and 1GB . The batery may die in a few hours with 2GB , on firmware 1.0.010.a
I test the current consumption at startup:
2GB –> 360mA ( 2 minutes tu STARTUP)
1GB –> 100mA ( less than 1 minute to STARTUP)

– Startup Current is not the same as typical or continuous current, it will be a peak due to backlight being on and indexing purposes.

– During indexing, the amount of time it takes depends on how many tracks not memory capacity. It is one of this player’s main weaknesses that it can take a long time if there are many tracks, and that it is designed to index them every time the player is turned on. I have never had mine take 2 minutes with a 2GB card in it, but perhaps I have higher bitrate songs and so there are fewer of them. I would estimate (having never timed it) that the longest wait I ever saw was under 1 minute with a full 2GB card in it, closer to 25 seconds.

– Mine uses the 1.0.0.010 firmware, the current measurements are as follows without an SD card in it:

Player On, Finished Indexing, Not Playing – 27mA
Navigating Menus with backlight on – 70mA
Playing music, backlight off – 60mA
Playing music, backlight on – 80mA
Playing musc, backlight off but SRS on – 86mA
(Backlight turned on adds +20mA more to any mode)
FM Radio 63mA

I did not measure the momentary current consumed when the player is first turned on and indexing, nor did I meaure with the SD card in it but I find it unlikely that accessing the SD card during playback could be as high as 260mA additional current.

I enjoy my 130 immensley.I find it easy to control on my morning walks, and the sound is excellent as i stride it out.
Having the 2 gig of storage is more than enough for my purposes. Thats an awful lot of music at any one time.

please help. i’ve got Sandisk® Sansa m240 1GB MP3 Player. it was very nice playing. but now days when i turn on there is error in my player. the error is Not enough space for music DB. please Free 8MB.

i know, many of you had this problem and asked for an advice like one thousand times, but still… hopefully, you’ve got a tip for me as well…
i have my e130 for 2 years now, it’s an ok mp3, and i don’t really complain about it….
however, about 1 month ago i was listening to the music and my mp3 just shut down… at first i thought that the problem was in the battery… but not really…
i plugged it to my laptop and the screen is working, and i can even see my music on it.,..
i tried a trick with taking out the battery and holding power key, but it didn’t really help me :-S
please, anyone! any comments will be appreciated! thanks!

so my sansa e140 can be detected by the computer. i can delete and add files if the unit is connected to the computer and the changes are recognized. once i remove the connection of the unit from my computer and turn it on the changes (songs deleted and songs added) are not recognized. it’s still the same playlist.

ok, for everyone with e130 (and possibly e140) “keeps getting an I/O device error, only language screen, than something about 4MB memory…” problem, I just spend six hours of my life trying to solve it and fix my dad’s e130 and I succeeded 😉

so, step by step, how EXACTLY I did it:

0) my system was windowsXP SP2

1) remove the battery
2) keep holding the menu button and plug in the usb, keep it for a few seconds more, untill the system will tell you it found a stmp3500 and want to install the hardware
3) allow it to reach windows update for that matter and install the drivers
4) now you have new device that is called “Player Recovery Device Class” you can check it in device manager (Right-click My Computer, click Properties, click the Hardware tab, and then click Device Manager)
5) and now is time for flushing new firmware…I managed to find two versions of firmware for e130:

6) I tried both of them in many different combinations and finally one and one only miraculously worked for me and that was the one when

I HAD THE SD CARD IN THE MP3PLAYER, THE PLAYER WAS RECOGNIZED AS “Player Recovery Device Class” BY THE WINXP AND I STARTED EUROPIAN sansa-2.0.0.01e.exe !

PS: i don’t think that there’s a big difference between europian and american version of firmware I mention it just to be accurate about the situation. and big thanks to anonymous guy up there somewhere who turned me to right direction with stmp3500. hope that help to others ;]

does anyone know a secret way to transfer songs that have been ripped into itunes without having to rip again to your sansa 280.switched to sansa but my library is in itunes in wrong formatt i guess. need help!!!!

I have to say, I love the hell out of this thing. I have one that I swear to you will never die. I do not advise doing any of these things to your nice mp3 player, howerever the following are allegedly detrimental actions that have occured to my poor e230…
1. Washed in the washing machine (several times)
2. fallen off my single story roof on to asphalt.
3. Sat on.
4. Dropped in a filled tub of water…And SANK (I dropped stuff on top of it on accident)

Ok so the silver frame is ripped off, the screen is shattered, and it water logged, and Ill be Da**d, that liltte thing keeps on workin! Yess after all that punishment Im still using it, (Granted I cant see the screen) But still I love it. If you want something durable, This is what you want.

I tried the lyrics function with my sansa e130 but on my mp3 the lyrics freeze at a certain point while the song continues playing. I synchronized every line myself with Winlyrics but around the 2:00 mark the lyrics stop.

Help! My e130 will not update the internal card. On startup, it says it does for about 1sec then goes to the normal screen. Songs that I have deleted are still showing up in the library, but do not live on the device. It does not update. Can anyone help? Thanks

@Jeff:
Sounds like your SD card has got an error in the file system; I ‘ve had this several times. Copy your songs to your PC first, reformat the card and put your songs back on. I think that will work! (and if not: no damage will happen)

okay im not sure what the message displayed on my player is due to the lcd being messed up a bit from a fall.. but it turns on and says “reformat….” (i cant make all of it out) then it wont turn off, ik have to remove the battery for it to powerdown.. please help

I decided to try to upgrade to the 2.x version on my Sansa e130, thinking that if it failed, I would be able to downgrade back to 1.x as many have suggested.

I downloaded the MuVu driver and got it to detect in recovery mode. My experience after that was pretty much like Xaero’s post on April 20th, 2006 at 8:08 am (you can Ctrl-F to find it). It detected the device, attempted to reformat, and then said that the upgrade failed.

After that, the device would not turn on…it would just flash a blue screen and I would be unable to turn it off.

Here’s the part where my experience differs: When I connect it in recovery mode and try to flash the original 1.0.0.010a firmware, it also fails, just like the 2.0.0.01 firmware. So now I can’t get it back to work the other way either.

Somebody mentioned that Creative has a “firmware uploader” that seems to work well (Striepan on July 16th, 2006 at 11:26 pm), but that is no longer there…it seems that Creative only has a firmware uploader that directly uploads the right file, instead of letting you choose it.

My question is:

1) Do any of you have any advice on how to proceed at this point?

2) In case my 1.0.0.010 firmware file is not correct, do any of you still have a copy of that to email to me? I can no longer find it on Sansa or anywhere on the web. I would be happy to get it back into its original 1.0.0.010 shape.

Hopefully, there will be replies (this forum hasn’t been touched for a while). If it turns out I can’t fix it, I guess I got a few good years out of it. I decided to try the upgrade because of the ambient squeaking that occurs when you pause it was too annoying.

If any of you out there have any ideas, especially previous users who have successfully upgraded or recovered (Xaero, Mike, Tibor or Synic), I would be grateful for your help. Thank you!

I just received an email of your post today, March 29th. I don’t know why it takes 3 days (!) to receive notification of new posts so any help by me or others may require that you wait additional days for us to know you posted anything.

I own an e130 and a Sansa Clip, but recently my Clip battery died so I started to use the e130 again. I had forgotten just how much better sounding the Clip is, I can barely even stand to listen to the e130 as it has muddy sound (I loaded same audio files I had on the Clip) and bad clipping/distortion with same headphones. I liked the e130 when it was new but now I can’t stand it and will get a Sansa Fuze next.

I just wish the Fuze had a standard mini USB socket and used a standard cylindrical NiMH battery like the e130, or even a standard cylindrical 14500 Li-Ion cell would be GREAT. I don’t mind the slight increase in size as much as the higher capacity and serviceability that standard batteries offer. Oh, also I wish they were all waterproof even if it meant getting rid of the miniSD card slot. I mean waterproof from gaskets/etc, so I didn’t need to put it in a waterproof case… I never use 3rd party add-on cases for inexpensive little MP3 players.

JC, thanks for your answer but I need the OLD firmware updater (1.0.010a.exe), look, I was trying to do this:

“Here is are the instruction from Xaero for upgrading the firmware from 1x to 2x. He has sent me an email (Thanks again Xaero):

This is my process (before fw. 1.0.010e, after 2.0.001e) …this is for sansa e130 (btw, on my first try i can see new device named sansa e140 🙂 fw was wrong flashed. That is why i must first use same fw. flash file like original (fw 1.0.010e, i dont know why).

1. put together fw. 1.0.010e and 2.0.001e , download it (two files, both on oficial website sandisk, fw 1.x is here: http://sandisk.com/Assets/File/Downloads/firmware/sansa-1.0.010e.exe , i cannot find link on sandisk, but google find him)
2. make sure, that you have all files backed up. After flashig is Sansa absolute empy. Download driver for Creativ Muvo TX FM mass storage (on Creative website, this is necessarily for installing device in RECOVERY MODE) and install it.
3. get into recovery mod -> lock HOLD button, press and lock up power/menu btn., connect on USB ( continually have pressed menu/power), for approximately 5-10 sec you can see new device found ( STMP3500 or thereabouts). Windows now install driver for this device(it use Creative driver).
4. Now you can try update your device with fw. 2.0.001e(confirm caution). If successful, you have it. If you see message: failed, dont worry.(i have tried 5 advances, but with same effect: failed….)
5. now is time for resuscitation: so, use flash number one(1.0.010e), program waiting on your Sansa, you must get into recovery mod and program begin with writing flash into Sansa (you can see progress). After this flashing you have same flash version like at beginning. (with flashing at version 1.x i have not problem, no failed messages)
6. in this step you write on Sansa flash version 2.0.001e, simply run flash updater, connect Sansa(in recovery mode), run updating. This step is equal like step n. 4, but with one difference: now pass flashing successful 🙂 So, now you can get into menu, information and you can see new version 2.x, enjoy.”

Hi Akira. Yes I still have an e130 but it is inaccessible until tomorrow but I will link the firmware that program extracts soon, tomorrow or the next day (whenever my reply to that appears since it seems to take a few days for replies to appear).

In the zip file is a text file listing the CRC values of each individual file so you can check yourself to be sure they are intact. Otherwise I have never reflashed e130 firmware files that were extracted this way so I can only assume they will work for you.

Good to see you have it working Akira. Thank you for the link to the battery but I have already made a small external battery pack out of 3 x AAA cells but when mine failed it was because water had gotten inside and fried a part on the board, so any battery has parasitic drain rather quickly.

If I had payed more for it I would order the part I need from an electronics house (I think it is simply a small diode in the recharge subcircuit) and solder that in, but I had already gotten a lot of use out of the Clip and beaten it around some so it is time to replace it, and also I decided it is too bulky for my pocket with an external battery so at least it works again but for portable use I’m still thinking about buying a Sansa Fuze next.

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About

Jeremy Toeman is a seasoned Product leader with over 20 years experience in the convergence of digital media, mobile entertainment, social entertainment, smart TV and consumer technology. Prior ventures and projects include CNET, Viggle/Dijit/Nextguide, Sling Media, VUDU, Clicker, DivX, Rovi, Mediabolic, Boxee, and many other consumer technology companies. This blog represents his personal opinion and outlook on things.